


Lose the Avengers?  Unlikely...

by nagasvoice



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: AO3 1 Million, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack Crossover, M/M, Swearing, Team Avenge the Losers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-09
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2017-12-26 02:16:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 90,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/960393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagasvoice/pseuds/nagasvoice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just sayin', here, that people expect some very strange things from Cougar's prowess at shooting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Pooch Assesses the Situation

**Author's Note:**

> Continuing an on-going UST situation from my 2012 Bang story, which is here.  
>  http://archiveofourown.org/works/804005/chapters/1516058
> 
> <http://archiveofourown.org/works/804005/chapters/1516058>  
>  
> 
> That ran long enough I figured it was time to start a new batch of chapters.  
> That one is a lead-heavy bit of fieldwork where the Losers run across Hetty's team from NCIS: LA, and Max is involved in crazy back-engineering projects on unknown tech, and the Losers rescue people, set things on fire, kill other people, climb in caves and blow things up... as you do.  
> During all that, Cougar has his wicked way with practically everybody, or thinks about it, except Jacob (aka JJ, Jake) Jensen. He might get too attached to Jake. He's fighting the sensation that it may already be too late.  
> In this 2013 Bang, several persons mentioned in that series are appearing in person now. It seems logical that, if folks like Clint Barton exist, so do the rest of that team. Some of them have admirable cars, as Pooch has reason to know.
> 
> Artist and excellent beta-reader slashersivi was kind enough to make a complement piece of art for Chapter 5 in this on-going WIP...  
> That's here, and it is fabulous.  
> ["Scared Cats and Brave Dogs"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/999663)  
>  
> 
> On the writing itself, thank you *very much* to my invaluable beta-readers, joidianne4eva and slashersivi, who caught a lot of things like duplications and awkward phrases and plot issues. Also thanks to cougars_catnip for co-writing short cat pieces that kept me cheered up and interested when I was in process for this piece, for cheerleading and general cat video awesomeness!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How long do you think Jensen could wander around the City without somebody noticing what he's doing to their tech?  
> Also, there are some damn fine cars.  
> If this is Hell, it is very well appointed.

Later, the way Pooch told the story, it was all Natasha Romanov’s fault. That gal is nearly as paranoid about surveillance as Cougar. She noticed them first. Picked JJ right out of the surveillance feeds around Avenger’s Tower, and then she told her SHIELD handler, Coulson, who sicced his pet archer after them. No kidding, Barton trailed them around New York for three days--legendary SHIELD Agent Clint Barton, as Cougar warned them later-- and fuck if any of the Losers ever noticed him there, hanging up somewhere playing gargoyle. Except Cougar. Who grew increasingly frustrated by knowing without being able to catch him at it.

Give the Losers that much, they believed Cougar when he warned them. They just hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Pooch knew that cold itch between the shoulder blades. They’d each had an arrow pointed at their backs for minutes at a stretch, waiting for the call-sign.

But SHIELD--which meant Agent Coulson, and beyond him, Colonel Nick Fury-- who turned out to be an old buddy of Clay’s, who would ever have thought-- no, those guys didn’t give Clint Barton the call-sign to take down the Losers one at a time. They could have. Apparently the NSA would have given them ribbons and flowers and shit if they had.

But no, they just... waited. They just smiled, quipped all their goddamn smartass quips, and let Jensen spiral in closer and closer, falling into Tony Stark’s spiderweb.

Of course JJ got Stark’s attention, silly techno-nerd-boy couldn’t help it. Stark’s got practice at handling hostile military pros and big dollar industrial competitors trying to hack his systems with the latest and greatest, but it’s not like he forgets about the dumb youngsters in the kiddie pool either. Apparently his recruiters patrol those watering holes, picking them off like little newborn gazelles. Netting a full-grown brute like JJ, aka J-Mageddon, might normally involve Hemingway-style posed pictures with the elephant gun and the rowdy federal trial for hacking government sources and blowing up agencies with certain sorts of embarrassments to hide.

But no, it’s all quiet. Stark isn’t sharing. J-Mageddon went down, files gone, every alternate ID vanished under the muddy water without a sound, and now nobody’s talking about it. Nobody is saying boo about it when JJ checks his usual haunts. They know something, though, the whole web is skittish. For sure nobody’s talking to ex-Corporal Jake Jensen.

JJ doesn’t look like trouble in person. Big dude, but he looks totally goofy, harmless as a floppy half-grown Newfoundland. Gawking up at the signs in his dumb tourist persona, while he was playing with Tony’s networks, tweaking everybody’s tech all to hell like a damn concert pianist. Wandering around in those New York crowds, as plain as day the bastard spawn of the Captain America strain by some line of big pink Milwaukee milkmaids, practically radiating healthy muscle and shiny perfect teeth with the *ting!* of absolute batshit crazy gleaming from his happy, happy eyes.

Of course Jake should’ve been more suspicious. He claimed it was the best damn data feed he’d got in months of trying to track down Max, after the guy’s stinking little UFO project got itself shut down by the Losers. Well, with help from Hetty’s bunch of undercover cops, wandering in fresh from Romania with backup from her NCIS team. Turned out Hetty’s bunch were affiliated with the Navy in Los Angeles, of all the damn things, and the Romanian junket was due to some private war out of Hetty’s past, but her people went out there after her anyway, on their own time.

Now that’s a fucking team, Clay kept saying.

Cougar just looked at their CO, shook his head, and walked away. Roque snarled that the Losers were more about the fucking up than the team, thank you, which made Jensen start cracking up until Roque batted him upside the earhole with a open palm, _bap._

By then the Pooch was in the living room with the game turned up loud, pretending he hadn’t heard any of it. Better part of valor, not being there. Never having been there. It might take him awhile, but he could learn this stuff: _Do NOT be there._

Clay and Roque went there. Dumb shits, they started having that discussion about what they need for a team, what they didn’t have, what they would never have-- Well, hell, as Jensen reminded them, General Ross’s black ops paramilitary contractors could be called teams, if you believed that a pack of random rabid fruit bats is an effective unit of intimidation. Which would be hella better than zombies any day of the week, right? Or at least the slow kind, your basic normal shamblers, not the runner type zombies…

JJ and Pooch have had those conversations, there’s been times just waiting on some op for so long that, as JJ puts it, your brain starts to scratch itself bloody like a fleabit dog. JJ claims he’s got too much of that Puritan Guilt Complex going, always got to be doing, got to be pecking away at some kinda work, he can’t freeze there like a Cougar-basilisk baking out his molars on a rock. That comment got a pretty damn prehistoric look from Cougar, too.

See, that’s the problem with the stuff JJ says, his constant asides and off-topics and silly mental jokes and crap are infectious. Just try to report something he said, and instantly you’re gone, miles out to sea in some kinda freaky mental riptide, doing it yourself. Next thing you know, you’re asking yourself where to find Swedish fish and gummi bears, and it’s all downhill from there.

So yeah, JJ’s right, Ross’s not-so-sekrit black ops goons are really not an effective, functional military command, as any of the Losers understood it. Or the mercenaries Max uses, either. You wouldn’t call Max’s goon Wade any sort of command officer, even when he was busy rousting his stinkin’ bunch of ex-KGB and drummed-out former SAS and mercenary dirtbags, making money on the side by playing at being a narcotrafficker, as if Max didn’t pay him enough during off-time. Or else Max really is cheap. Weird, that.

Roque kept saying he can’t keep track of the players in this damn game without a scorecard, and he’s right. Roque is frequently right, and it’s always on all the wrong things--like any halfway decent Captain. And just who the hell had had the bright idea of searching New York to track down one of Max’s tech suppliers, anyway? Clay made it sound _simple._ Go meet their contact Aisha, get the intel, find the supplier’s sorryass rundown business location, go there and look, let JJ find out stuff, maybe ask some questions. People in New York like to chat, right? How hard could it be?

Clay swore the contact was given to him by someone he trusted in CENTCOM, and this contact person, Aisha, had been feeding him good stuff. Roque hates her, butt-kicking boots and all. Clay swore blind she had great intel, and sometimes she did. Odd thing, though, Jensen found her servers rerouting everything from somewhere in Africa. Beyond that, Jensen had some indications that her original signal ran back to some Arabic guy named al-Fadhil. But go dig in on that guy, and Jensen got the GPS for some cocaine kingpin’s headquarters down in Bolivia, of all places, not even on the same damn continent.

When JJ looked harder, some dirty Company op blew that place to hell a month ago, took out al-Fadhil and a bunch of little kids, and who’s inherited? Well, gee, lookee at that guy’s more public non-Swiss accounts, gee, there’s Aisha’s personal info. And, come to find out, what is her last name? Yeah, al-Fadhil. Yep, they blew up her daddy down at that place, and now she’s inside the system handing along intel on Daddy’s former competitors. She’s even been handing over expense money to Clay from accounts that got “developed” down in that palace in Bolivia. Talk about blood money.

Yeah, this was the kind of advice Clay was getting from his own chain of command. Between them and Ross’s buddies at the Company, who needs enemies? Their first day in New York, it seems the NSA databases had earmarked the Losers as terrorists.

JJ found that out just before they walked into a bunch of nervous subway cops sent to pick them up. What sane federal authority on the planet would send out twenty transit cops after a bunch of deadeye combat ops like the Losers?

Get real, boys. You might be brave, but standing in one place sorting for memorized faces for hours is not the same as rousting Third World warlords.

Roque just grinned at one of their squaddies and that poor little sadsack messed his pants. Not even Roque’s biggest knife, right? And let’s not get started on what happened when Cougar put down his sidearm. Apparently looking up the rubber band of that slingshot of his turns out to be really bad for your mental health.

One good thing there: The Pooch had enough zip-ties to cover the job safely, confine the prisoners so nobody imagines they can get loose and try silly ideas. Nobody is allowed to give the Pooch any shit _ever again_ about the cost and weight of all the boxes of zip-ties he packs in. Or the wire or duct tape, either.

To top off that whole NSA shit cake with some bullpucky frosting, the Agency jerks had backdated their reports. They’d tied it to their scrambled-up Bolivian operation and all those murdered children, complete with files and AP pictures and faked news reports that were never aired, and all kinds of crap. JJ had screencaps to prove that, because his network of hacker buds went berserk.

But did Clay hear from his own command at all? Of course not. No call-in, no request to turn themselves in, no inquiry from their own general, no nothing. Any concern from old comrades in service? Hey, a tweet or three? _Nothing._

Hey, did anyone think that whole kid-murdering thing was out of character for the Losers? Did any of Clay’s old buddies give him some kind of cautious heads-up?

No, instead it was Jake’s webhead buddies who were ready to go to war for him. They pulled up vids and records of Wade --goddamn yeah, that asshole, Max’s right-hand guy Wade--giving the Company ops their orders to go bombing hell out of that Bolivian drug palace, even _after reports of kids trapped inside._

JJ had to talk down his hacker folks online. He’d been working all-nighters for two weeks, following Stark’s networks before that. Add on the task of managing all his angry new hacker buddies dogpiling in on the mess online, and it's no wonder he started getting sleep-dep careless out on the street in daylight.

He told his pet crazies online, _Pick your battles, guys, we can handle this. Save it for really important stuff._

Sure, as if saving the Loser’s butts from violent federal takedown wasn’t important stuff to work on. Cougar had just nodded solemnly, agreeing with Jensen. The Pooch did not want to know just what kind of stuff Cougar thought was really important.

On the other hand, Cougar preferred to keep things professional. JJ’s hacker buds were just civilians, half of them kids themselves, fer Chrissakes keep ‘em out of it. Pooch agreed on that. He didn’t like the idea of drawing federal attention to unpaid amateurs that JJ might accidentally drag along with him into trouble.

So there they were, their fourth day in New York, in front of the UN Building with the flagpoles, standing with their thumbs up their noses like a bunch of clowns, caught flatfooted by Natasha. She just walked right up at them, striking-looking bombshell of a woman with maroon-red hair, like she wasn’t impressed. Cause, you know, she really isn’t. And they stood there gawping at her, pinned there staring, like they were just waiting for the NSA to show up and make an example of them. Maybe sniper-shoot them as a danger to the public. Probably in the _legs,_ because that was just the agency style. Shoot ‘em so they can’t run, but they can still answer questions.

Natasha even said so to Clay, right to his face in the plaza: “Come with us if you want to live. General Ross has a burn on for your boys.”

So yeah, Natasha’s fault they’re penned up in Stark’s tower, it really was.

And the second person at fault? That would be Corporal Jake Jensen, aka JJ, aka Jake.

Oh, right, that’d be ex-Corporal Jensen, former Spec Ops Communications, apparently at top of the Most-Wanted Whistleblower list in the country. Along with the rest of the Losers.

Jolene is so going to kill Pooch when he can finally let her know he’s alive, let alone back in the Real World. Just from the piles of furious messages she’s left him on JJ’s satellite phone link, he knows that. Fond stuff like, _goddamn you Pooch if you’re still alive I’m going to kill you myself._ She made sure other folks knew it too. Apparently Max’s pet Agency goons were a little more cautious on the domestic front. They would rather make the FBI send out agents to bully her. Well, they can try. Yeah, just try to hammer Jolene, a hard-nosed service spouse who was used to Spec Ops soldiers fooling around in her kitchen and climbing off the roof for shits and giggles. Yeah, Fibbies trying to intimidate a pregnant, tired-looking Jolene with swollen ankles in a faded housedress, a fricken’ hospital ER nurse using her most stiffly polite Southern Accent.

Well, there’s their first mistake--she did a helluva number on the agents who visited her and tried to bully a pregnant woman into giving them useful stuff on finding the Losers.

Plus, she had backup.

JJ’s sister came barreling in on the middle of that scene, in a cold fury, ready to make war on Jolene’s behalf, because _she_ has hacker buddies too. Jennifer’s convoy emerged armed with video cameras on the shoulders of a dozen retired Service guys, all their feeds hooked up on a private satellite mesh as livebloggers. Plus her daughter, aged seven.

The daughter is their nuclear option, and she knows it. That little girl knows exactly how deadly she is with the wicked quivering lip.

“I just wanna see my uncle Jay and my uncle Carlos and my uncle Pooch,” she said, blinking big-eyed around into the cameras. All the cameras. Cue the lip. “And I wanna show my puppy to my uncle Roque,” and the tears started trickling there--” and get a ice creeeeeamwith my uncle Clay--” and then she gave that little crumpled-sounding stifled noise that will break stronger men than Roque, and then she cut loose with the wail. Better than a siren. Like JJ himself, that kid’s got some lungs on her. Brought the neighbors running from four blocks around.

The Agent in Charge wasn’t buying any of it, but he had to look into the cameras on top of that fire-siren wail, and assure everybody they would be applying all available resources to sort out what had happened with the team. Still, really lucky that Jolene and Jennifer and daughter and backup didn’t all end up in federal custody.

It’s not hard to guess why somebody wants to pick up JJ. Not when you see him standing in the same room with Steve Rogers. Yeah, Captain America, thawed out after 80 years, _for reals._

Pooch is never going to forget the look on Agent Coulson’s face when he looked up at Jensen. Just for a sliver of a second. And then it was gone, all calm and easy and bland again, which was fucking scary.

Coulson smiled gently, pleased, as he walked up in front of the UN flags, just like that. He shook everybody’s hand, ending with JJ.

“Would you like to talk to the designer?” he said, nodding at the Starkphone in Jensen’s fist.

Well, turns out Coulson is a total Rogers fanboy. Of course he wanted to get Jensen, the long-lost proverbial, the prodigal cousin or whatever he is, returned safely and legally to the fold and let his father or grandfather or uncle or whatever Senior actually was-- let Unca Steve Rogers finally get to know him, whatever the fuck that genetic legacy might be.

It appeared Coulson knew something about it ahead of time. He admitted to Clay, later, that they’d checked on Jensen’s genetics before he sent his guy Barton out to watch the Losers.

Coulson’s SHIELD guys weren’t fooled by the NSA records either, they blew past the lousy faking on the Bolivia reports in a few hours.

General Ross’s shadowy bosses had declared the Losers were AWOL and extremely dangerous on behalf of their great buddy Max, but their NSA fakers didn’t make much of an effort, put in the absolute scratch minimum into the paperwork end of things.

That was what got Coulson and then SHIELD’s commanding officer, Colonel Fury, interested in the Losers. Started them combing over the records of, as stated by Colonel Fury, “a bunch of _aging_ Special Ops soldiers” to see what they’d done to earn all that attention. As Fury said, right to their faces later, their operational records made it clear they were nothing terribly special. Just Spec Ops nutballs who had a regular gig taking out Third World thugs, warlords, gangsters, and careless covert operators for certain US agencies, supposedly off the record. Sorta. And not getting a helluva lot of credit for it, either.

Well, until JJ and his amazing technicolor stolen UFO completely blew up their lives.

Fury didn’t ask about that, either. Just smiled that smile.

The Pooch has seen crocodiles that don’t scare him that badly. Yeah, the really big brutes that eat migrating wildebeest and duke it out with killer-mad mama hippos. Hippos are bad-ass, worse than tiger sharks to anybody who has seen those two fight it out in muddy African rivers. Do _not_ tangle with mother hippos.

Yeah, turns out of course Fury had given a few orders of his own about keeping the streets clear around the the Losers. Barton wasn’t the only SHIELD agent trailing the Losers around New York, watching and recording and probably laughing their asses off at Roque’s comments on Fifth Avenue shop fronts. Or JJ’s wheedling about toy stores.

Hell, they weren’t trying to be noisy, they just wanted to get the intel on Max, goddamn it. They had zero chance in hell of fighting their way free on SHIELD’s home ground, going up against so many corporate and federal agency resources. Dumb shits, the Losers just didn’t know that was what they were doing.

In fact, via the Cougar/Barton relay later on, it was suggested Fury maybe had his SHIELD agents kind of... clear the field of clutter, keep other folks away as they moved around New York.

It must have been like a rooster trail of competing assholes tagging along every time they moved, with Barton tracking all of them, plus watching for NSA and FBI agents and Ross’s troops and Ross’s mercenary contractors and Max’s mercenaries and God She Only Knows who else. Pooch is pretty sure Barton got in a coupla dustups with other followers, because Barton told Tony Stark in a meeting that he needed more sedative arrowheads. Tony kidded him about having too much fun working out just where to dump Ross’s guys for maximum embarrassment. Also, Barton teased the Losers later about leaving a few goons for Roque to keep him happy.

Yeah, amazing how the Losers had lasted three days in the streets without running afoul of all those gonzos tracking them. The Losers just ran into a few. Various tails hadn’t been so careful as the SHIELD folks; they left evidence that put JJ in a bit of a nasty mood. Cougar found sloppy surveillance tech hidden badly in his hotel room, so JJ grabbed it and got all up in their low-level feeds. JJ got to tearing hell out of Ross’s network, which was vulnerable because that bug was one of Ross’s contractors getting greedy, using old cheap tech.

The others... well, who knew “punching bag” was in the job description for those guys?

Separately, or in a line of alley scrimmage, Clay’s soldiers were just better than Ross’s guys, or Max’s guys. That’s entirely due to the pride that Roque takes in dirty fighting drill. Plus, Cougar can broadjump like the proverbial cat, for fuck’s sake, and hides all kinds of wacko shit in his hair under the Hat. Jensen didn’t even have to get out of handcuffs by dislocating his thumbs, thank Gawd, he always whines so much about it messing up his keyboard speed later.

Mad skillz they might have, but in a long war of urban attrition, it sure wasn’t enough to try to slide past the Avengers on home turf. Those New York networks for SHIELD and Stark Industries that JJ was hacking? It was all set up as bait. All of it.

Lucky for them it was not Ross’s bait, or Max’s bait, but somebody a whole lot more powerful. Tony Stark didn’t need much. Just sink that hook and reel that fish up out of the water, smack it into the creel without asking for anybody’s help. Certainly not that of Nick Fury, or SHIELD, or anybody else. JJ is tasty tasty meat, yes indeed. Pathetic.

Tony Stark has his own nasty smile.

Captain America is his _buddy._ No way is he just taking Corporal Jensen at face value.

Tony had them all taped, logged on sensors, background files sorted, their faces targeted, long before the moment JJ wandered into the Tower’s perimeter sensors. As Tony explained, he was just being polite about it, letting them show off what they were trying to do. Letting them prove their intent.

_Not terrorists on any logical checklist you care to apply,_ as Tony made clear to his associates. He was pissed about that whole NSA-fake backdated AP report and OMFG, the state of the official files. He was beyond pissed about those Bolivian children--not just any drug mules, but children as mules--being _murdered_ by agents working on _his tax dollar._

Apparently he shot off some choice details at Fury about federal agency management of such operations. Also, bonus suggestions on how to handle that stinking Bolivian op file, on a timeline, or else Tony Stark must deal with it. Hey, just executing due diligence on security around his military tech. If General Ross’s IT guys can’t manage their data better, if they’re inserting false records into the NSA’s files, then Tony has to wall them off from abusing any more Stark tech to do it, no matter what collateral damage that might cause any related military units. Oh yeah, and he’ll be _happy_ to make public in any Congressional hearings why Stark Industries has refused to contract with certain federal branches and departments.

There’d been Tony-style shouting about the Losers not being valid suspects, about their being so pathetically squeaky clean that they weren’t earning his goddamn valuable _attention,_ and by the way, just how many agencies were blowing taxpayer funds for entire squads working on non-valid suspects, due to fraud in the NSA records?

A few days later JARVIS actually played JJ and the Pooch a choice selection of clips of this rant, taken on the first evening they were guests in the Tower. Clips where Stark was shouting into the camera in close-up, jabbing fingers on file manipulations and all.

Stark gives a helluva rant.

Picture, picture, file record, showing conflicts of mismatched dates and times. Comparisons of records that show digital tampering. _Proof_ that the good General Ross has committed not just stupid malfeasance at the request of his buddy Max, but expensive and ineffectual fraud.

Fuck the stupidity, Tony yells, they all oughta be chasing the real problem here, who is clearly Max. Better known as that guy who keeps kidnapping physicists to work on his goddamn non-official stinking stupid Snook project claiming he’s going to use it only on America’s enemies, including anybody who disagrees with his taste in domestic politics too.

Projects which the Avengers and the X-Men and the Fab Four have now shut down, what, four times already? Florida, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, yadda yadda, and then there's been at least twice on biowar weaponized ebola virus projects in Russia, and oh yeah, also those rip offs of the Weapon X adamantium project stuff in Canada.

Max would have been crossed out of the family Bible long since if he didn’t have so much Imperial pull from his family, his money and his political cronies in the party, but that’s been evaporating since his embarrassing gas warfare debacles in various towns near Bhopal, India, and yeah, who do we credit for opening up that rat’s nest-- oh yeah, who was that whistleblower? Gee, wasn’t that attributed to J-Mageddon, the hacker? Yep, that’s right.

Who may, allegedly, be the com tech on the Losers.

Funny, that.

Yeah, the same guy Ross wants his batshit goons to murder in Tony’s city, in New York, rather than openly putting the hacker on trial for treason, where they might risk revealing not-so-much-state-as- _partisan_ -party secrets.

And who do we have trying to stop Max’s games right now?

The Avengers? The Fab Four? SHIELD? Gee, what has Fury ordered done about it lately?

Crickets.

Right, that's all, folks, we hear... crickets chirping away in the quiet.

Yeah, other priorities, right? So, yeah, not so much on the organized research around here, since Max was never officially found guilty in person. Just highly suspect.

So, who’s actually been giving Max some pain?

Oh, right, the Losers.

That’s it.

So, as Tony monologues about his rhetorical questions, he started in on their extremely limited background for handling this whole Max situation. He hammers the finger at more computer graphics.

Is this the _best_ choice of operatives to protect the American people-- and the entire rest of the world come to think of it-- by going after Max?

Are they the best team to take on this well-connected, rich, neofascist idiot-savant who thinks he knows best?

Well, let’s review.

Do they have any backing or funding? Hey, since the Losers were declared top of the NSA hit parade, they’ve been cut off from American banks, right? Do they look like they have disposable income from other sources? After all, they have J-Maggeddon, hacker extraordinaire, capable of robbing the Bank of fucking England at will.

Tony Stark flicks Fury a rapid series of pictures. It’s pretty low on the dignity, high on detail, snaps showing each one of the Losers as they entered the Stark Tower elevator.

Roque is glaring upward in the elevator, covered head to foot in faded brown, a threadbare brown Army-issue tee over cargoes patched with various fabrics, neatly sewn, and suspicious old dark stains across the knees.

JJ is looking over at the view outside the glass of the elevator, pointing happily. He is wearing a joke-shop paper pirate hat and an acid green tee with an old, peeling cartoon of the Hulk winking over one shoulder in a spine-wrecking girlie posture. His ancient jeans and flipflops carry fresh mud.

Their sniper is rummaging in the pockets of his leather jacket. It is ripped and scarred with recent white knife-cuts over a long history of scuffs along the forearms and chest, and hangs loose on him as if he’s lost weight.

Clay is talking to their guide, Natasha. Their CO’s dark Hong Kong-tailored suit doesn’t hide the old brown bloodstains across the knees, forearms, and lapels, and it’s become a bit too tight.

Pooch is rubbing his back as if it hurt. He wears an oil-stained wifebeater over sagging green baggies. That snap also shows his heavy biker boots are coming apart at the seams.

Then there’s a couple of shots of Pooch in more old, stained clothes, exiting their van at one of the hotels--an old van with bald tires and suspiciously fresh registration stickers.

Honestly, they look like tired, sleep-deprived tourists who got mugged.

How about technical expertise? Not so great either.

Did any of the Losers have the physics or electronics training to recognize or disable a snook? Why, _no._

Were they willing to tackle Max anyway? Were they likely to encounter one or more different kinds of Max’s other cray-cray weapons, if they kept toddling along on their current trajectory? Hell _yes._

If the Losers were allowed to roam freely then they’d just keep trying, wouldn’t they? And maybe they'd open a cask of lethal germs or trigger off a poorly-designed dirty bomb, or maybe even end the world with a black hole of cosmic proportions. High chance of that, actually, since Max’s own people aren’t really competent to build repulsors properly in the first place.

From the snook project’s own records, confiscated in Puerto Rico, none of Max’s physicists had ever understood one-tenth of the math involved in Tony’s work on matrices and repulsor physics, but they were handwaving it anyway.

Tony shakes his head. Okay, Natasha and Thor rounded up the Losers with no shots fired, but those boys could leave if they wanted to badly enough. If they got spooked and ran off, then what? What luck have conventional forces had in rounding up and confining the Losers, so far?

Crickets again. Zippidee doodah. Zilch. Nada.

And the casualties so far, from these bad, dangerous, killer guys coming to town like Santa Claus?

Twenty subway cops knocked down, restrained, and left zip-tied to handrails. Oh yeah, including some butterfly bandages on cuts and a decent little improvised splint on the guy whose shinbone broke when he fell down some steps. With a bottle of water to make sure he kept his fluid levels up until the paramedics got there. Gee, that mean nasty ol’ sniper turns out to be a medic, too, and he won’t leave a NY subway cop to bleed out. There was enough time for Cougar to do it before any effective response team was coming, and in the end they’re serving on the same damn side. Tony chuckles over a transcript of Cougar’s cussing in Spanish while he worked on the guy.

Knowing Cougar, he probably didn’t care if several of the cops spoke Spanish well enough to place his accent. He didn’t care _who_ told him to get moving, he was patching up that cop.

Yeah, JJ is going to give Cougar shit about that little act of mercy until the end of time. It’s so fun to watch. JJ says it makes Cougar’s face go all pinched up, turns him into Popeye the Sailor, which makes it worse. JJ loves it, he just keeps at it until Cougar takes him down paramedic-style and pins JJ to the floor in a headlock until he makes that boy yell out an apology in the worst Spanglish known to man. He’ll whap JJ around the head and shoulders for the rest of the day, ambush him without warning, totally silent, and make JJ yelp, and then they’ll both start laughing. Yeah, they’re about as fucked-up as Roque and Clay, but it makes them happy.

Tony is not happy about letting the Losers run wild to go chasing Max. He’s also not happy about pulling them out of the field so _nobody_ is working on Max and his little snook problem.

Hellfire, man, the Losers are just a pathetically stubborn little Special Ops squad of sojers left hung up to dry by their own command, at the behest of General fucking Ross, a bullshit Pentagon politico who’d already pulled all kinds of crooked shit trying to capture and study Bruce Banner the way he’d study a special strain of _fruit fly._

Fuck, who even needed more than the team’s name? The Losers.

Fury oughta give the Losers some goddamn medals and send them home, not crucify the bunch of tired scarred-up aging GI Joes trying to do the right thing without the backup, or any skills to handle the risks.

Oh yeah, by the way, how long _have_ these guys been out in the field anyway?

The Company’s records couldn’t even fucking track how many jobs they’d done for that lot, and gee, turns out nobody even knew how many deployments Roque or Clay or Cougar actually served. Half of their records are mismatched on which bits got left out. Their personnel files are a joke, their CO can’t even get CENTCOM folks to give him a straight answer on calculating their correct pay rates and retirements and filing standard HR stuff. Apparently none of the standard rules applied to them: _Use until broken, then discard._

Tony snapped, “It’s a fucking disgrace on the armed forces, individually and collectively. What are you, Colonel Fury, going to do about it?”

That got a snort. “You know that they don’t have a lot of friends. Ross isn’t alone in feeling the burn to shut them up.”

Oooh, bad answer. It set Tony off even worse.

Strange thing, it was clear that Fury did that deliberately.

“Give them their fucking honorable goddamn discharges and send them home to have their fucking goddamn nightmares in peace,” Tony had shouted at Fury, jabbing at a dozen different electronic VA medical files flashing past on their way to Fury’s desk.

Tony was angry about what they’d been through, furious at how they’d been deployed, outraged at their whole ridiculous stupid history.

Fury replied, “Do you seriously think these guys will stand down? Or just go home into retirement? Why did you think Ross resorted to the faked NSA listing?”

Tony shouted back, “Oh, right, so let’s try _killing_ them, right? Why, somebody just took them out behind the barn and tried to shoot them, right? Tried being the important word there. Hasn’t worked very well so far, has it?”

Fury just hummed a little, tilting his head, like he had a couple dozen ways to do that, but he didn’t like all the collateral damage. No doubts about how to handle bait like Jolene and Jennifer, he’s just not stooping to it if it isn’t mission critical. Work out a better plan.

Tony got even louder. “Did anybody even try talking to these guys? Hey, maybe we could just tell them, you know, _hey guys, we’ve got this, let it go. You brought it to the right place. SHIELD and the Avengers know about this guy, we’ll handle nailing Max._ We could do that. Did anybody try that?”

Fury shrugged. “We didn’t find any record of attempts. Coulson volunteered to talk them in, if that’s how we decide it should go.”

“If we can even convince these guys, by now, that we really will deal with fucking idiot fascist Max and his damn fingers in everybody’s pies. I sure wouldn’t buy it if I was them, the shit they’ve been through. Goddamn, did you see the records on that Hong Kong op that Clay--”

“I was there,” Fury said flatly.

“Do those records even resemble one tenth of what you know happened in the field--”

“Nope,” Fury said, popping the p-sound noisily. “Back then we didn’t know what Max was trying to do with that biowar material.”

“So who the fuck redacted it so--”

“Handy storage warehouse fire in Jersey destroying old paper records when SHIELD was busy elsewhere,” Fury said.

“Fucking hell, you can’t even decently get them assigned to some other theater. These guys sure won’t pass a decent combat readiness eval--” Um, yeah, big chunks went flying past that weren’t just his, or Roque’s files... shit, Cougar must have enough files to stock a medical library by himself…

“Do you think they’d ever consent to go into medical rehab?” Fury said. He brought up a file with tiny print, too small to read, headed with Cougar’s name. Some recommendation for a facility Pooch had never heard of. JJ later looked it up. One of the big military prisons, some kind of solitary confinement unit with experimental medical treatments.

Oh boy, Tony went off.

It was, JARVIS confided, one of Tony’s lengthier rants.

“Dood,” Jensen had said to the Artificial Intelligence afterward, blinking. “Dood, your man Tony has, like, _blood pressure,_ you know? JARVIS, you worry me. Is this stroking-out fit really his usual thing? No? Even so, chirpin’ lil blue-eyed bitty Jayzus in a baby buggy, man. Talk about a driven type-A who’s gonna scream himself into an early grave. He’s gonna blow blood vessels in his massive brain. We can’t have that, JARVIS, we gotta get him to calm down, you know that, right? We do not want to lose Tony Stark any sooner than next century. He’s got to have time to invent the next-gen of intensely cool stuff, right? Sure, you know this, and I know this, but--”

Which, of course, made him JARVIS’s best buddy for a whole four hours--until he started tinkering with some security protocol on the door of his suite in the Tower. The boy just cannot leave well enough alone.

The Pooch got a recital of that one when JJ was all sad and sorry for himself because JARVIS was not allowing him to open any doors by himself, and required one of the other Losers to let him in and out of everything except his en suite bathroom.

Well, that was after they were up in the Tower, under house arrest. The process to get there was... a bit nerve-wracking, to be honest, but at least there weren’t any flesh wounds.

The Pooch is counting this as a win.

Sure, it didn’t look like one to start with.

If Tony had a soft spot for them, it sure as hell didn’t show when they first saw him. Oh no. Their first glimpse, it’s the armor, they’re all gaping upward at repulsor jets blasting above them in the plaza at the UN. They get the Iron Man, gold and red armored flying robot blur-thing, a nicely judged pavement-scarring blast from the blue flames, the whole jazz. He comes in flying backup for the Black Widow when she came up out of nowhere into the plaza.

Then Thor buzzed up, all crackling and sparking and glinty-like, with the big dramatic red cape flapping. He landed next to Widow, who didn’t so much as blink. Thor was smiling a little, like he was going to buy ice cream or something. One hand held the hammer angled safely downward. Yeah, that Hammer. Pooch isn’t going forget _looking up_ at blue forked sparks crackling out of Mjolnir any time soon. Talk about being outgunned.

Thor’s other hand held out a limp little heap of a guy that Pooch remembered as running some nasty little quartermaster scams for Wade, waaay back when they were all serving at the same base. Thor put the guy down on the paving to go on with his little nap. Or concussion, maybe. “Your friend here, he seemed eager to meet you,” Thor boomed. “Do you want to know why?”

His voice kind of...echoed a bit.

There they were, stuck out there on the paving in front of the UN flagpoles.

The Losers looked at Natasha, they looked up at Thor, they looked waaay up at fucking Iron Man hovering about the 30th floor or so, and they knew if they ran, they’d be a wet spot on the paving. If Roque even moved his hand toward his knives, if they even lived through trying to get loose--if they dodged the Avengers chasing them in the city-- well, they’d find other people chasing them too. Guys like the one Thor had just plucked off the street, carefully, so as not to hurt him too badly.

As Iron Man’s bullhorn voice told them, they’d better come along with the Widow, toot sweet, or they’d end up in some goddamn secret cell so fast they wouldn’t have time to say, “prisoner of war” or “waterboarding.” Or, “Guantanamo”. Or, “Whistle-blower.”

Everybody glared at JJ.

“What? I didn’t! I just deposited some insurance with some-- with a deadman switch that’s due to fire off if I don’t talk to them about an hour from now-- uh, yeah--”

Funny how that face-palm gesture, ‘hand on forehead irritable’ in the Iron Man armor, thirty stories up, is still pretty darn clear. The amplifid voice said, “Right, I’m having JARVIS split your comm into operational loops. You want to talk to your guy Alvarez, ask Coulson or me.”

“What--you can do that? Wait, wait, how did you do that?” Jake yelped, grabbing at something in a pants pocket and making everybody tense up.

Pooch’s voice didn’t even shake when he said, “Okay, guys, how about let’s just … let’s just do what the nice Black Widow lady says, hmmm? We can go with that. Anybody like that plan? Clay?”

“Clay never turns down an invitation from a lady like the Black Widow,” Roque said, which got him a glare.

It beat hell out of most of the alternatives on offer.

“It’s the Widow’s bitch boots, isn’t it?” JJ says, and the Pooch groans. All brain filters are off, JJ is going to be speaking his mind because it’s going to be dribbling out of his mouth the whole way. JJ is already nattering about the Widow’s sexy high-heeled boots, with which she could probably kill poisonous snakes _mid-strike--_ yep, that’s what they’ve got to work with. JJ’s wit, that’s the weapon they have left, Jensen’s run-on horrifying mouth--while they were trying to be classy about doing what the nice Black Widow lady told them to do.Exactly what she said. _Don’t step on the pressure plates at the doorways._

Somehow it wasn’t a relief to look at Coulson, either.

Oh yeah, Mister Normal. When he appeared, introduced as their guide to wherever they were going, he just looked like a nice bland guy in a suit, holding his hand out to Clay, then to the rest of them, and last to Jensen, like he was happy to see them all. Totally innocuous guy, looks like he sells pesticides or gas fracking contracts in the Midwest or something.

But he makes all the alarm bells go off in Pooch’s head worse than the God of Thunder. And that was _before_ Pooch knew this was the SHIELD agent who gave Widow and Barton their orders.

Coulson gives the Pooch that itchy command feeling, like it might be wise to slope off somewhere else, quick, before the Pooch starts insanely volunteering himself for shit, or something. Something upright and severe under the coat, there. It’s like some superpower, something that inspires ordinary sensible guys to go out and get themselves shot nobly because… ummm, yeah, somebody told them to. For the service ideal. Military devotion to duty and all that loyalty stuff. Because they trusted their chain of command with proper use of their lives. Or deaths.

Spooky stuff, come right down to it.

Whatever it was, it made the Losers run at bad guys instead of away. Made them believe for years they were rightly pointed at really bad guys who needed killing. All that ridiculous trust shit, which has been kind of bent-up and mangled pretty badly by their handlers lately. Like, to the point of not trusting any of their puke-pie asses, to quote Roque.

Of course Roque is angry about losing that. He says now he never ever bought into it, he was never a fool. But a cynic doesn’t work up his kind of service record. Hell, back when they were on medical leave, when Cougar first joined them, he and Cougar built them all an arm pullup wall for use when they’re _at home. O_ _ff-duty._ Roque says now the regular military's idea of devotion to duty was just ridiculous shit where thousands of pathetic little pukes need to find some place simple enough to pay them and get some labor out of their sorry butts, and the military will have them when nobody else will. Roque says any decent BDSM top would have such pathetic wimps sorted in about fifteen seconds flat, but none of those pukes have ever been that lucky in their entire lives.

There may be unusual leather gear involved.

The Pooch does not ask. Sometimes, teamwork involves knowing when to put on the blinders. Do not ask how Roque knows about tools and ropework and acronyms, and which tats the more famous masters will give to new tops just completing their training, and which clubs a noob should visit in any major town. Yeah, that’s without consulting the internet.

The Pooch wouldn’t dream of asking about it. He has Jolene to occupy his daydreams, and she’s plenty inventive without anybody’s help.

But there’s no arguing with Roque’s mad skillz at getting compliance. Give him a couple days with FNGs, and Roque has them prompt as puppies eager to sit on command. Thank God he never does that crap on his own guys. Too fucking proud to stoop to it, because the Losers are all fucking grownups who can use an alarm clock, and they know how to clean up their own puke when somebody has to drag their drunk asses home.

Honestly, Coulson makes the Pooch’s spine go stiff. Pooch has an instinct for spotting it in time to escape. Somewhere, in the back of his scroungy, sloppy, foul-mouthed, dust-eating sojer brain, he knows. He just _knows._ The Pooch still hasn’t figured out quite how Coulson makes him want to tuck in his shirt tail and stand up straight. Suck in his gut, all that. Maybe iron his goddamn pants for a change, pick up some new repair manuals to memorize, and go for a five-mile run in the morning, like he really ought to do a lot more often.

Pooch has noticed that impulse before, at a distance. Decent officers, whose troops love them. Some of the women officers he’s seen in action have that pull even more, it’s like an electromagnet hitting iron filings. But it was never that strong.

It sure wasn’t like that around his own CO, Clay. Oh, hell no. That’s exactly why the Pooch stayed. Clay’s a sweaty field grunt. Don’t get ambitious, just rest while you can, snooze in as long as you can, take it easy for the long term endurance hike or you’ll fucking bust something at a bad time later on. Clay always wears a suit, sure, but somehow he makes it look like he’s been up all night playing pool and getting in fights. He might get them killed, but not out of misplaced trust. It’ll be for something that matters, for a real mission objective, not because he bought into all the faked-out Ross-style crap rolling downhill at him.

Hanging out with Clay makes the Pooch want to recheck that he’s got enough zip ties, gas in the tank, hard liquor, and surgical thread. Makes him think about cleaning his guns and his sidearms. Yeah, and get that shot-up radiator line replaced on their transpo, which was always in such fucking crappy shape.

Coulson at the UN Plaza looked _normal._ No way. He can’t possibly be.

“Whaddya say, guys, let’s just go meet that phone designer, huh?” Jensen had nattered.

Out there in the bald plaza, Clay just nodded at Jensen that he had consent to go with Coulson, that Jensen got to go talk to the phone’s designer, who was hovering about twenty stories up, grumbling about something that cut in and out on his speaker voice.

That nod from Clay meant that Jensen made these...really undignified noises. Happy, happy Jensen. Kinda like his seven-year-old niece getting her dream doll palace, or ice cream with sprinkles, or a new bike. He’s so...embarrassing.

Roque made his cockroaches-are-disgusting face and refused to look at Jensen. He glared at Widow instead, who didn’t turn a hair. Not many women ignore it when Roque glares. He’s neutralized and under reasonable controls, and beyond that she doesn’t care, she’s not impressed.

JJ’s right about that, it’s kind of incredibly hot.

Hell, that kind of woman wouldn’t turn a hair when she eats boiled tendons off your bones. Yeah, they’ve met a few like that. Thank you, Clay’s wacko taste in women.

But still, _hot._ Like surface of the sun hot.

Possibly there’s something wrong with the Losers. It just makes you want to… shit, just like Coulson, _prove_ something to her. Earn her respect. Which, again, that stuff is fricken’ dangerous. Do not buy into the puffed-chest guy prove-something-ego, that shit will get you killed.

Knowing this, they still went along with Coulson and the Widow. They straggled along after Jensen into the nondescript door in a funky office building right near the UN, and clambered through some basements, into a big dusty lobby, and there they waited.

Cougar was still away watching, up on the roofs, but not free, not with Barton tracking him and given the order to bring him in.

Jensen kept chattering away at Iron Man on his comm--like he already knew the guy inside the suit-- until Barton could get Cougar escorted safely down to ground level and into their lobby room, without interference from anybody else. Apparently that little job kept some other SHIELD agent teams busy, too. When the two snipers showed up, those bad boys were walking along, weapons cased up neatly on their backs, having a civil conversation about scavenging ammo in the field. Which might surprise everyone who knew them. Shit, there weren’t even any handcuffs.

Cougar could duck out and go to ground in this city and never be found again. But Cougar gave his word, so that was that.

Strange thing: His word was good with Barton, and with Barton’s handler, Coulson. Apparently they go way back on nightmare Company ops, just not always on the same side. Anybody who can kid Cougar about his Stoner rifle was really tight with the guy, and here Barton was pulling jokes about the Hat, and Cougar was kidding them right back. Weird.

Yeah, surprise-- it was Cougar’s word that vouched for the rest of the Losers as far as Coulson was concerned.

That validation lasted through the long hike to Avenger's Tower. It felt like clambering along miles of oddly connected tunnels and pipe-laden underground passages running up into the base of the Tower. One of Tony’s sekrit exits, and no doubt scheduled to change when the city finished the demo job on that one subway tunnel. The Losers were all a little more ragged-looking by the time they got into the fancy lobby and the elevator spoke to them like an English butler. Startled them enough to hit the sidearms for a moment, but Coulson and Widow never turned a hair, just let them stand down slowly.

Meeting up with Bruce Banner in the elevator was another surprise, on both sides, and zooming upstairs with JARVIS talking at them all was the kind of weirdness that didn’t help Roque’s raging paranoia at all.

Then they saw the meeting room. Things whirred and moved around and screens unfurled off the wall and chairs unfolded from the table, and Barton put one hand on Cougar’s wrist, lightly, saying, “Easy there.” Weirder yet, Cougs didn’t take the guy’s hand off at the elbow, either.

Shiny tech, wide-open windows for miles, with special chairs for the extra-big guys in the Avengers like Thor. The extras on those actually fit Roque and JJ, which never happens.

The graphics on the big screen greeted them with diagrams. Two seconds and JJ was jabbering madly, poking at the diagrams and asking JARVIS questions, practically dancing. It took JARVIS shutting down that feed and Cougar and Clay both grabbing his arms to make him go sit down like a sane person.

The vid meeting with Fury was unexpected too. Via the big conference screen, Fury and Clay got into some pissing match about some fucked-up op in Hong Kong where they both ended waking up hogtied in some North Korean warehouse. Fury would say something, and Clay would scowl and correct it, laying out what really happened and who gave the commands and when things blew up. Then Fury would say something else, and Clay would lay that part out in detail, arguing points. Then they went on to other bad shit ops, and it sounded like they’ve known each other for, oh, a decade or two. They’re both Colonels now. But Fury has gone up in the world; Clay has not, precisely.

Clay is a goddamn colonel, commanding... oh yeah, four guys.

Good guys, yeah, really top-level skilled guys, a precisely focused black ops strike team-- but still, it’s pretty clear that Clay is, like, marooned in the field, waaaay outside the Beltway loop and all that political shit. From the sound of it, that’s the way he likes it. He’s run off as far as he can go away from all that fucked-up Georgetown social climbing his family used to be into. Fury just says, mildly, that he heard the family tried to meddle in Clay’s mission assignments and in national security business, not in a nice way. Family shit is also maybe where some of General Ross’s devoted hate-on comes from. Apparently Ross would love to crush Clay’s little rebellious squib of a team just for the principle of the thing, and better yet if he gets to embarrass Fury.

Yeah, as if Fury will sit still for this. As if Fury won’t lift a finger to stir the pot and get into it with Ross. And he might not, all cool and relaxed and calm as sulfur ice cubes. Why should he bother? You know, listening to all this, sorta sounds like, if you come right down to it, Clay is not a buddy. Clay’s just this guy he used to run into sometimes, nice to have your back in a bar fight. Nice knowing you, too bad.

Until Fury gives that weird smile. Fraud on NSA records, on terrorist watch lists?

Ross thinks Fury was ever going to sit still for this?

The call ended with them both grinning like a coupla lions who just got done wrassling, as if they were always BFFs, but that’s sure not how it looked to begin with. Who knew?

Anybody’s guess what SHIELD will do with the the unpleasant information about Max and his contacts and his snook shit and his really Speshul UFO Project that Clay also dumped on their nice clean meeting room table like so much camel muck, steaming all to hell. There’d been a lot of shit to give them, too. Jensen has been sooo busy: Lots of names, numbers, records, account summaries, videos even. Implicating lots of nasty stuff about that nice General Ross that Unca Steve and Unca Greenjeans Banner didn’t seem to like too much either, and apparently for very good reasons.

Then Jensen got the bit in his teeth and ran off into explaining about the UFO. Well, until Coulson stopped it, for being conducted on communication lines that weren’t secure enough for the topic. Which, hey, that accusation got Stark’s attention. Lots of yelling.

Doctor Banner, aka the Hulk, aka Unca Greenjeans, had been looking distinctly puce-colored around the eyes when he excused himself, apparently to go away and bang on things in the armored space that Tony Stark had built into the Tower for him.

Not that he’d been willing to occupy that space, until then.

Yeah, the Team doesn’t actually live in their spiffy apartments in Stark Tower, exactly. Apparently there wasn’t really a chummy Avengers Initiative on the inside, as the people themselves saw it. Coulson wanted it to be that way, the PR team worked hard to make it look like that, but it wasn’t. At least, that’s what Barton told Cougar later that night when they were hanging out on the roof. They had some fucked-up sniper detente thing going, where Barton could nail Cougar’s ass at will, or any of the Losers, and Cougar could ambush him to help the Losers escape tower custody, and it wasn’t in the national interest to waste such skilled expensive asses, so everybody was cool and nobody made sudden movements and they could discuss things pretty freely.

When Cougar asked Barton what he thought of the whole Avengers together group-huggie thing--he totally did ask, it’s all in the hat tilt and the half-shrug on that, Pooch has seen that look-- Barton just snorted.

Coulson had told them something about assigning the Losers as some kind of adjunct field op team to the Avengers. Watch their backs while dealing with Max’s people, or something.

Naaah, it’s babysitting by the Avengers to make sure the superhero team will stick together long enough in one place to be available to call up within an hour, instead of, like, twelve hours. Barton was pretty amused by it. Seems every radical jerkwad out there must think New York is the place to knock out if you want to ding America a good one in the eye or something. Certainly New Yorkers seem to believe they gotta be ready for anything. Cougar tells him nobody is ready for Max’s effed-up snooks. Barton says he believes it, judging by how Tony Stark is taking it on as a thing that needs handling by the real physics professionals.

The Avengers aren’t a regular working team, the Pooch can see that. They’re a bunch of people zooming past each other, busy with their own shit. For one, there’s Coulson and his SHIELD staffers helping out as mass troops in field battles when the Avengers need them, plus doing research stuff, but they have their own regular national and international defense work to do. There’s Barton and Romanov and the other SHIELD field agents, who don’t really trust Tony Stark not to hack their systems--which he totally does, according to Jensen, who is learning more every day just from watching this happen--and they think Tony is a complete wildcard lunatic. Which, hey, he is. They see him frequently because Tony zooms into the living room and orders pizza whenever he gets frustrated with Stark Industries design work.

Tony Stark was apparently ambivalent about the whole Avengers schtick. Not a team player, he claimed, which may be true.

After the first two hours of grilling from Jake, which turned out was a lot more time than Tony granted to most people, Tony has been avoiding the Losers. There’s a lot of acreage in the Tower in which to play dodge’em, and he’s got the tech chops to duck Jake’s electronic forays too.

JARVIS is totally biased in Jake’s favor, which is funny as hell, but even the AI will only help Jake to a degree. Tony claims the Avengers were a big pain in his ass timewise, and he’s got no time for playing movies and eating popcorn kind of stuff that he claims Coulson wants from them. Strange part is, he’s carefully devoted space in the Tower to accommodate each team member in the Avengers if they need to crash there. Of course Tony Stark has his own little multinational to run, except he’d rather let Pepper Potts run it, and sometimes Tony will pop up to socialize and get his picture in the papers. Or he’ll go off and bash things in his workshop and make new stuff while having nice conversations about gamma radiation with Doctor Banner.

Banner doesn’t want to be in New York much, given how much damage he can cause if he turns green and large-- and sure, he’s got better things to do than Hulk out every third or fourth day, or oftener if there’s an invasion by aliens or Nazis or Skrulls or whatever. He sure as hell doesn’t want to paint a bullseye on the back of whoever he’s hanging out with, knowing that Ross’s bunch might harass them afterward. He doesn’t want to provide hostages to enemies of the Avengers, either. Going to the Tower where it’s harder to get at his friends is sort of a last resort.

So, no, Banner doesn’t really want to hang out with aggravating folks like his fellow Avengers or risk walking around the streets getting pissed off. He’d rather be working alone on lab stuff, or charity. Science things, physics. Or go away completely, out of easy reach, doctoring sick kids in India, stuff like that.

Captain America isn’t around much either, he’s only there when he’s working out in Tony’s gym. Barton says Steve Rogers will organize team stuff, go out for restaurant nights, but otherwise he doesn’t hang out at the Tower.

Jensen has been hoping to ask more questions of his relative, but Captain America seemed to be dodging him too. This disappointed Coulson, it clearly did, but Steve was having none of it on the guilt trips. Steve Rogers was taking art classes at some university nearby, and he’s a team-spirited guy to the bone, but he’s got homework assignments and finals, and gee, it turned out that art history is just as dense as biochemistry, when you take it seriously, and boy howdy, Captain America takes his class work seriously. He and JJ have had some effed-up conversations about crazy nineteenth-century painters and poisonous chemistry, because JJ’s brain has trivia bubbling at a furious rate and no mission going to soak up all that energy.

Steve doesn’t seem to have that OCD thing, but he remembers things at an amazing level too. He apologizes, cuts it off, waves, goes off to his classes.

Barton commented acidly to Cougar that it’s almost like Steve thinks his gig as Captain America were going to magically vanish someday. Like the super serum will stop working, _surprise, bloop!_ and he’ll have to survive as a regular guy with some office job. Steve acts like he’s going to try working for an art director at an ad agency, or some normal shit like that. _As if,_ Barton snorted.

Then there’s Thor. Yes, really, Thor, God of Thunder. Or, if you prefer, the massive alien from Asgard who says their physics really don’t translate for him to explain the heavy-duty tech that he wears and uses and flings around. Seriously, Cougar could better describe internal combustion engines, just from listening to the Pooch venting, than Thor will discuss any of the Asgardian tech he uses all the time. The Pooch has asked on that one a few times. Oh yeah, and Thor is absolutely another team guy, rah-rah-rah, but Thor has this girlfriend, Doctor Jane. She’s an astrophysicist trying to get some work done in Arizona and doesn’t want to get dragged back to New York even if Tony asked her nicely. When Thor is back here on Midgard, he’s following Dr. Jane around one place or another, while she’s doing conferences and shit.

Thor will talk at great length about how crazy he is about Doctor Jane, usually in iambic pentameter if he can manage it. Borrowing rap lyrics, sometimes. Over his breakfast cereal. For real--he sings crazy shit about physics at her, banging the table and crooning on the phone every morning.

He’s in New York now because Coulson asked him to be there, but he wants to go visit Jane. Barton says Thor is almost always gone. There’s been a lot of time going off to Asgard dealing with fucked-up family shit-- Cougar knew better than to ask about Loki, Thor’s brother, because nobody wants to tell them. Cougar gets it, that topic was still too hot to handle. Besides, Barton will talk about Doctor Jane instead, and this is all serous intel that Clay wants him to get.

Gotta give Thor some kudos, the alien guy from Asgard went for an Earth gal with serious brains. It’s kind of inspiring, given that the rest of the Losers have such crap for standards on how you should pick out your significant other, and then how to treat your significant other.

Well, except for Cougar, who claims he has standards for such a commitment that he himself could never possibly meet, so he doesn’t even try. He’s just doing sex, not proper Romance.

Since he says this stuff when he’s smashed as hell, usually with two or three gals climbing on him at once, all eager as cats in heat to prove that he totally meets their standards of romance, nobody takes this seriously except Cougar himself. Just watching him roll out the word “commitment” when he’s drunk off his ass is worth the whole bar crawl. The girls love it.

They shriek at Roque, too, climb on him like a jungle gym. Turns out skinny drunkass white heirress-type girls in glittery shit at Tony’s fancy PR gigs are even worse about public displays of affection than cheapass military bar scores. More likely to whip off their panties in public. Also, more violent.

Turns out heiresses have a lot fewer inhibitions about setting fire to Clay’s shirt tails, or trying to shoot him with a bitty little purse gun, while Captain America is busy trying to dive in and take it out of their hands in time. There’s pictures of Steve being heroic-- and yes, that was twice during the _first three days_ they’ve been staying in the Tower. So Tony’s gal slash corporate boss Pepper says sweetly that the Losers are not allowed out in public with the Avengers and the press _ever_ again.

Tony clapped Pooch on the arm, told him they were a bunch of clueless sandbeater grunts and he’d be honored to take them on a decent bar crawl once they were off house arrest. Barton said it’s the most fun he’s had in months.

Apparently the other SHIELD folks under Coulson are dubious about the Avengers gig even though it’s really Coulson’s big deal.

Up on the roof, Barton explained irritably to Cougar that he thinks the whole Avengers gig is idiotic. The Avengers only get called in when shit is way overripe. They get called in to help people deeply in trouble, not at the start of stuff. It’s reactive, not proactive, far too last minute, too unplanned, too much impulse and too little strategic maneuvering. The enemy brings it, then the Avengers fight on ground that’s been chosen for them, instead of picking the turf properly for the scenario so the ground suits them better than the enemy. And if Coulson doesn’t like him saying it to anybody who might hear it, he picked the wrong guy for the team.

Then Barton snorted and added that Coulson thinks the Avengers might learn something from the Losers about dealing with surprise battles that find you. About fighting shit that’s really not your idea in the first place.

Cougar snorted back at him. “Like-- _don’t do that.”_

“Yeah, like fighting monsters in Manhattan was ever _our idea._ And hey, don’t ask me, I dunno why Coulson or Fury wants you guys kept in the house. I mean, aside from Fury playing keepaway with General fucking Ross, because I swear he’d do it just to watch that toad explode, and you know JARVIS will catch the Ross-fit on a video feed and put it up on the net to go viral, just because.”

“Nothing personal,” Cougar said dryly, making the archer crack up.

It’s still weird to watch Cougar recite all this intel for Clay, doing the expressions and gestures and little fidget movements. It’s this horrible reminder that he’s got this wacko camera in his head recording everything he hears and sees all the time. Cougar can report like a regular guy if he wants to play dumb around other people’s COs, but he never bothers at home. Clay asks for the memory troll, he gets it. The rest of them can lump it if they find it creepy as fuck.

He and JJ together, reporting, are a real acid trip.

Maybe it’s a sniper thing. Apparently Barton and Natasha can do it too. Come to find out, some of the other SHIELD agents are just as creepy in other ways. Coulson, for example.

It’s weird to watch Coulson react--or more precisely, completely fail to react like a normal human being--when Clay outright asked him about the assignment in a meeting.

Coulson has a deadpan like no one else. Turns out, he likes project management techniques. Likes laying things out, pinning them down firmly, Making Expectations Clear. He gives his people Stuff To Do By Date X, with followup by Person Y.

Clay just hates meetings. Coulson calls them, Clay wrecks ‘em. It’s kind of a revenge thing, really. The Pooch has begun to wonder if Coulson is doing it to Clay on purpose, making shit up, deliberately _giving_ Clay things to push around and poke holes in.

“Hey, what’s the point of keeping the Losers around here?” Clay demands at one of his meetings.

Coulson just looks at him. Then he looks at the rest of them. Then he tells everybody that SHIELD had just received orders from DOD removing the Losers from the NSA’s terrorist watch list and assigning the Losers to do protective watch duty with the Avengers, with their operational mandate coming through SHIELD. The acronyms are flying hard and low, hitting kinda like bricks.

Totally flat affect, dead level tone, like it’s just no biggie. As if SHIELD always had the juice to intervene in Clay’s chain of command, or General Ross’s either, just like that.

Clay gives him the Dubious Look. Another challenge.

So Coulson flicks on a video feed to SHIELD HQ, and JARVIS put up a very simple document with a signature. Yep, that’s a letter dated that morning, come down from the Secretary of Defense, yes sir.

That causes a stir.

Clay’s phone starts going off, too, but he ignores it. CENTCOM didn’t call when it would have helped, so they can just fucking wait for it later.

Roque is not happy. Getting removed from a watch list is great, thanks, but they shouldn’t have been on that list in the first place, and none of this guarantees that they won’t find themselves right back on it shortly, like in the half-second after Coulson has his back turned. General Thaddeus fucking Ross is a vindictive bastard, as half the people in that room have good reason to know.

Clay makes a face that has Steve Rogers grinning, and then Bruce Banner too.

Roque starts getting louder at it. He explains he is not a trusting person. He is a field officer. He explains that he’s their goddamn _Captain._ It’s not his job to be trusting. He has plenty of evidence to prove the wisdom of _not_ buying into all that stuff falling downstairs on them. As he explains, at some length, profanely. The details get everybody nodding.

Coulson actually frowns, scribbles out some notes on his Starkphone, and confirms a few of those details with Clay, who just nods and looks tired.

And hey, Roque asks, what’s this protective watch assignment? That’s it? No details? No briefing, nothing?

“What the everlovin’ fuck,” Roque says, “does that even _mean?”_

There was some speculation about it. The Avengers are very amused. Tony asks if he needs to adjust his security protocols to allow the Losers to patrol the sidewalks for him. Are they supposed to be doing watch and watch about, marching around Tony Stark’s tower in uniform and playing colorguard?

“Hey, might teach you to march in step,” Pooch mutters at Jensen.

Jensen objects. Hey, are they putting Cougar up on surrounding roofs for indefinite guard duty, with no idea what he is supposed to watch for?

Which just made Cougar and Barton grin like dogs. Barton starts humming the Mary Poppins song about the chimney sweeps, _Chim Chiminy Chim-Chim Cheree..._ Yeah, hang out on the roofs playing parkour games about fifty stories up, and that's on the old buildings.

Roque objects again. If this is a freeform assignment, how about they adopt some schedules of practical stuff instead? Like, oh, they could be teaching Captain America something about modern weapons systems, or getting Tony Stark to learn to duck and roll for once, instead of always taking a blast square in the faceplate?

Barton mutters something on that one. Yeah, as if Widow hasn’t been trying to drive it through his stubborn skull for months, now.

Roque isn’t done, though. Are they, God help them, supposed to ask Jake J-Mageddon Jensen to take a swan dive into SHIELD’s servers to go looking for gaps and weaknesses? To look for Max’s people trying to tunnel in like moles on Tony Stark’s tech? What?

Agent Coulson just smiles that maddening smile, and says JJ is welcome to try. Says it’ll be good for his agents to learn what they might be up against some day.

Tony just snorts when Jake looks at him. “You want something useful to do, reinstated Corporal Jensen? Are we talking real work? Stuff that Coulson’s SHIELD programmer guys can’t touch legally, or don’t have the chops to deal with?” He nods at Coulson.

Coulson doesn’t move a facial muscle.

But Tony says, “No, Coulson, none of your faces, don’t be making sad faces at me, your baby programmers may be pretty good but you’re not paying for top flight, and your guys really don’t have the chops to cut it on dealing with _my_ shitcan list, trust me. You do not need the Helicarrier sunk in Jamaica Bay because they didn’t have the juice for this.”

Coulson still hasn’t blinked, but Tony goes on jabbing the finger, pulling up files, as if he reads some answer in that total no-expression anyway.

“I was just doodling last night, some lists of stuff that’s on fire that’s beyond my basic level of patience, but I bet you, Jake--” the finger is jabbing files to move on each point, “--I bet you’d eat it up like Twizzlers, like gummy bears, like the best damn garlic breadsticks. You like garlic breadsticks, right? I can get you a list of tasks running until you die of old age, with your Colonel’s permission, and _all of it_ is in the service of your country’s security, and after the mess you guys just vomited up in here the other day-- by the way, thanks for the stink, politics-wise, that’s all fun stuff, love to see what it does to the Virginia elections-- I’ll add about two dozen more tasks which will be directly in the service of tracking down this idiot Max and his fucking evil twin, and shoving their heads up the ass-end of a snook and hurling it into the sun personally if I have to.”

“Not funny,” Barton says from somewhere, piped in remotely through JARVIS's speakers.

“Yeah, not joking,” Tony snaps. More finger jabs, toward the big windows. “I will build a space-hardened suit if I fucking have to. This snook stuff is going to need the tees dotted and the i’s crossed and I do not have time to chase down every last evidence crumb like a goddamn dog, but if it will make you-all happy, I will share this task list with JJ, toot sweet, and give him access as he needs it.” He smacks the table with his palm, _bam._

Right.

“Caffeine and red vines, to start,” Jensen says, grinning.

Tony just points sideways at the wall as if he is shooting a gun. “Done.”

JARVIS murmurs from one speaker, near Jensen, “If you have other food requests, we can have delivery within two hours. I put Sergeant Cougar on my alert list to confirm when it is time to enforce a rest period for you, Corporal.”

Tony starts laughing.

And damn, Cougar has his hat brim tilted way down, but he's grinning underneath there.

The AI’s smooth voice continues, “Your preferred workout times will also be necessary. You can provide us with your hours for sections of the gym or the lap pool, I can assist in planning activities in tandem with someone else or alone.”

Cougar just lifts his hand, gives some Amslan sign gestures which JARVIS acknowledges smoothly, and the hat nods once at JJ, _We got this._

Coulson smiles. “Excellent suggestion. Plus, sparring in the Tower gym with the Avengers, ramping it up by degrees, would be good practice for both teams. Let’s say, having Clay’s guys start practice with Captain Rogers, who always needs as many live workouts as our personnel can handle.”

Steve nods gravely, agreeing.

JARVIS says, “I have Captain Roger’s schedule available to coordinate.”

“Great,” Clay says, looking around at his team. “That’ll bring up your unarmed combat scores nicely.”

Pooch just groans.

The whole damn DOD assignment thing is downright odd, given that the Avengers appear to be holding the Losers in protective custody. Signature from the heights of DOD or not, the Losers haven’t dared leave the Tower for a week. Especially not after the stuff with those party girls trying to shoot Clay at two different events put on by Stark Industries. Apparently, old payment due from Franklin family stuff, going right back to good old days of college. Who knew frat boys never forgot? Damn, for sure Pooch wishes the uproar hadn’t interrupted the displays of new apps for those armored smart cars that Tony's SI folks were presenting. JARVIS’s recordings still aren’t the same as looking over things in person.

Specifically, Stark and his attorneys and his wealth are holding off General Ross’s legal minions without even breaking a sweat. Tony’s been looking at arrest warrants dropped off at the Tower doors, and laughing like a fiend, flinging them at ST minions to deal with. “Give it a coupla weeks, guys, these things need time to get counter-filed in court. Plus, my legal beagles have these accounting guys, keep 'em in a flaming pit and fling 'em raw meat. I mean, absolute terriers, who like to go ratting up every last stinkin’ little hole, can’t shake ‘em loose unless you pry open their jaws with an adamantium stick, right?”

By noon of their fifth day in the Tower, it’s clear Tony may be a social guy, but he’s not used to guesting company for this long. Tony’s got the twitches already, he hasn’t eaten much of the pizza. “I’m hitting the garage for some me-time, Pooch, you wanna criticize the maintenance routine for me?”

“Um, now? Okay. Sure. See you later, guys.”

Strange, though, Tony worked on questions for Pooch's benefit first, while they were laying out tools to get started. It took the Pooch an hour just to finish writing up notes about Chicago and Detroit parts suppliers that he might want later, gleaning an entire treasury of contacts from picking Tony’s brain. Well, and JARVIS’s even more considerable resources.

Then they really started to work.

Pooch sighed, wiping a chromed headlamp rim with a clean rag. “What, is that the replacement part from 1928?” he says in the echoing space.

“Correct, sir,” JARVIS answers quietly, apparently from nowhere. There’s jazz playing on the speakers, likewise wafting in from nowhere. JARVIS comments to Pooch that this is in his honor, they tailored this playlist to Pooch’s tastes, because Tony’s normal working environment tends more toward hard rock, thrash metal, and techno.

If it’s hell, as Roque thinks, then it’s very nicely appointed, and Tony says he’s is ready to fly in Jolene and their baby and Jolene’s mother to safety the instant Pooch lifts a finger to ask.

He’s a little afraid to.

But then, he _knows_ Jolene, she does the networking thing better than anybody, he knows what she’ll get up to the moment she locks it in nice and tight, BFF with the likes of Natasha and Pepper Potts and Doctor Jane and Darcy--

Pooch groans.

The other sniper, Barton, he _warned_ Cougar about the women of the Avengers. Hey, if they thought Natasha was bad, just wait until Pepper got her hooks in them.

But Pooch knows their capture is Natasha’s fault really, she was the first one who saw Jensen gawking around like the tourist he is.

Natasha just flicks a shrug of one shoulder the first time Pooch mildly accused her of it. No need to verbalize, just a twitch. Reminds him of Cougar. Those two--and the archer, whoah boy, talk about a sniper’s sniper there—have had an entire conversation with a coupla hat tilts, a cryptic word, some frowns, and maybe a hand wave if they were speaking Italian or something and getting all emo and extravagant.

Da fuck, who the hell knew Cougar could get by in Italian, anyway? Ask him about that, and he makes a slinky jiggly gesture with one hand, a sly dirty grin like a dog under the hat brim, and one of those wry sighs that said all the good ones got away. And he’s only talking that much because Clint’s been working on him that morning, softened him up and got him to responding.

Clint laughs, and says something about Milan that has Cougar pulling his hat brim down to avoid responding

“Fuckin’ hell, I do not want to know,” Roque growls, stomping through the kitchen. Well, the whole Tower as a place puts him on edge. Imaginary people talkin’ outta the walls and great big plate glass windows you could drive a Cessna through, no decent damn cover anywhere unless you were Tony Stark and had Tony’s passwords down into the labs, or the armored workrooms, or the garage with the cars of the Gods, or the unholy basement--Pooch still dreamt about bits of blurred passages, coming up from that UN building, hiking miles and miles and miles in a maze of pipes, the first night they made contact. And then the garage. Oh God, the cars.

Tony’s cars are the devil whispering sweetly on one shoulder, promising sweet, sweet rewards.

“Feel like cleaning these carburetors?” Tony says over a rusty motorbike in the garage workshop. “Okay, talk to me about how you filtered out the dust for trucks, over in the sandbox. I want your MacGyver best, Pooch, I need this shit. Talk to me. There’s gotta be a better way to improv than what I learned. And you can’t always get coffee filters.”

It’d been ten hours before Pooch surfaced long enough to drink some cola and take a load off, his dogs were barking hard enough to make him wince. His arm bones were still buzzing with the vibration of the wire brush he’d put down an hour ago. The rouge cloths were a wreck. But the forks and rims and fenders gleamed on the workbench, raw metal ready to be chromed or painted. Tony was right about fixup work--the whole world might suck mightily, but a piece of metal well-prepped was a project well on its way to completion in spite of the entire trendline of the universe, and an improvement on general entropy, and a damn fine thing to show for his time.

Pooch grunts, pleased. “Okay, so you’re fabricating all the parts nobody can find for you?”

“Yeah,” Tony grunted, wiping off his forehead with his grimy knuckles, where the inside harness of his welding helmet left red marks. Pooch approved of his welding style: Fast, efficient, and minimal, not as heavy-duty as the Pooch insisted on for combat life in the field, but clean. “I could subcontract, sure, but nobody needs to get their nose into this.”

Pooch considers the objects at hand. “Is it gonna be big enough for him?”

“For who?”

“For Captain fricking America. And damn, is he massive across the beam or what?”

“Why do you think it’s for Steve?”

At Tony’s blank look, Pooch adds impatiently, “Who else could get you to leave some hotsy totsy damn schematics I don’t even understand, and tinker on rusted bike parts from the Forties? All you gotta do is ask Cap about his old bikes and you know. Hey, c’mon, you may be fine, Mister All-Nighter, but I’m getting stupid. We need some coffee or we need to fall over, or both.”

Tony stretches his arms, arches his spine backward, bones crackling. “I was trying to dodge the quizboy for a coupla hours. Minute I go upstairs, your boy JJ’s gonna be all up in my bidness again.”

Pooch snorts. “I thought you gave Jake enough programming work for a month, keep him busy.”

Tony snorts back, wiping sweat off his face with a greasy rag that leaves black streaks instead. “Yeah, he cracked Obie’s old data system in Buda and the other one in Batumi in three hours and the third one in Poti, and he started overloading SHIELD’s system with stuff on Skrull labs. Obie was a fucking idiot, he’d sell to the lowest of the low, but c’mon, the Skrull? Those jerks don't even _pay,_ they try to hijack you on delivery. And what Jake put together from Obie’s records-- We’re talking maps in 3D with all the consumables and power grid and sewer lines--you could hear ‘em at SHIELD HQ screaming from over here.”

Pooch sighs. “Yeah, that boy makes more work for everybody else than he ever does himself. Funny how that works.”

“All the good ones do. Shoot, look at that, Coulson is driving ‘em with a whip, like he’s running a Roman galley. Ha, it’s a beautiful thing.” Tony waves at monitors over a work bench. “Aaaand, yep, Coulson’s got it done juuuuust in time for the next batch, if my estimates are right-- which I am, I know I am. Get this kid’s smartass wit, look at him-- oh hey, wait a minute, what is that--Jake, you jerk, quit it! Shit, five seconds to spare and he’s tickling my tech and trying to sweet-talk JARVIS like he’s diddling his fuckin' girlfriend-- good, JARVIS just caught him and rapped his knuckles. Teach him some manners.”

“He could use ‘em,” Pooch grumbles, which makes Tony chuckle.

Tony nods at the monitors. “I’ve got Jake’s rhythm down now. That kid doesn’t code like anybody I’ve ever worked with, he’s all over sixteen things at once, pasting on bits and pieces like he’s a worker bee making honeycomb by random numbers, swear to God. They can’t stop him so easily because he’s not doing the same thing long enough to catch him, which is okay for the kind of ops you guys get assigned, but probably not his best use, you know? Complete waste of talent with the whole team, if you ask me, but nobody ever does. Who else did you tick off besides Ross, to the point where CENTCOM keeps your team piddling around with all these Third World crapmeisters?”

Pooch snorts. “Where do we start on that one?”

Tony shakes his head. “They’re just shredding paper, feeding public dollars into the stupid drug war, which I’m telling you is just another debacle, the hippies were right, and this is me telling you, me who used to run those damn budget numbers. Well, I had Pepper running those numbers, but believe me, she extracted every last one with stainless steel fingernails out of my _soul,_ and much as I love that woman, you never want to see what she can do with her shoes. I mean, the heels alone--” Tony cocks his head and looks at Pooch, waiting for something. Oh yeah, there was a question a ways back buried in there. Yeah. Right.

Who did they not piss off?

“Let’s just say Clay has a talent,” Pooch says, feeling the tiredness ooze out of his bones.

Tony waves it off. “Skip all the stories about the cray-cray girlfriends, nobody cares. No, that’s not it. Here’s a theory-- Clay got promoted to unsafe levels, that’s what happened. Clay’s just too fucking straight arrow honest to keep it in step in Ross’s crooked-ass political Army, and just to top it off, now he won't lend Cougar out on any old damn job they see fit, am I right?”

“Yeah,” Pooch says, closing his eyes. “Pretty much.”

“Okay, good to know. Do not put Clay in a room with Ross and me and Cap--oh boy, do not put Cap in there, I’m telling you-- unless you want to walls atomized and blown in tiny specks way out to Greenland, right? Cap is sudden death on hand-wavey unrealistic contractor bullshit, you know that, right?”

“Right. Pretty much. Kind of a relief, if you really want to know.”

Tony laughs. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. Now, if it was _me_ signing your paychecks, I’d use you guys more along Cap’s line of attack. Come in like a bomb, hit these terrorist organizations with Jake spiking their servers like he’s pithing a frog-- shit, man, he’s got a sweet hand with a firewall-- that’s a sweet workaround, you go, kid--” Tony was grinning at something on different monitors above his fine-parts bench. They’d downed tools there, tired out past the ability to focus eyes and fingertips, about four hours back.

“Maybe CENTCOM doesn’t think we’re reliable enough for bigger targets,” Pooch says quietly.

Tony pivots around on one heel, tilting back and eyeing Pooch under his brows as if Pooch resembles a bit of rusted wheel rim: _Hmmmmm._

“Nyaaa,” Tony says, and swivels back to the monitors. “Naa, they just don’t know what you’re good for. I mean, what targets to aim at. Your group is so tight and so small that you impact like a 22 bullet, but you do a lot of damage and come out the far side with a fragmented huge-ass mess, _boom._ Blow a shit-big hole like a Minie ball, you know, one of those soft lead rifled Crimean War jobbies that goes all to shreds in the body. Civil War specials too, if you recall. Extremely effective at putting down soft-body targets. Not so great for the minimalist modern style, you know, where we brag in these damn procurement meetings that we’re providing diplomatic stealth and minimal collateral damage. Like, _oh, look, he fell down,_ nothing shows, he’s just _dead,_ imagine _that,_ musta been a heart attack! Instead of that fun old Teddy Roosevelt style of thing, going _oh hell yeah,_ we just blew a big ass hole in your guys and you’re _next,_ peckerhead. Your guy Roque, he’s kinda on the ‘bigger is better’ hella huge explosion side of things, right?”

Pooch scratches his forehead for awhile, thinking. “Yeah, his default is big scale. But he’s always working to keep it down to the task, get the job done as small as he can, not take out the whole damn street. He tries really hard for that. It’s like a mantra.”

Tony wheels around and looks at him again, tilted back on one heel. “Fuck, we get some of those big-ass aliens showing up again, I want a guy on _my_ side who knows how to blow up the whole damn block if we have to. With the mad skills to scale it down smaller if he can, of course.”

Pooch tilts up both eyebrows. “Hey, I’m all down with helping out on that. You asking us?”

“Dunno yet,” Tony says, tapping his chin. “Gotta get your military crap covered. Wait for what Fury’s got to say about adopting a whole team of orfinks at once. He’s not gonna break up a team that works. Just a question if he’s got enough work for you guys to justify all the paperwork reassigning you guys to SHIELD. Yeah, JARVIS estimated, what, forty per cent chance of that one? That’d be cute, he’d like shoving that in Ross’s face. Always, I’m telling you, always count on the testosterone thing, try to get it working for you. Are those guys into pissing contests or what?”

Pooch just rolls his eyes.

Tony nods. “Plus, I mean, there’s extra truckloads of paperwork involved if you get to skip out on SHIELD basic. You’d be an upgrade as teacher for their transpo classes, Pooch, but you’d scare _hell_ out of baby agents. I mean, weepin’ Jesus, when you and Jensen get to yakking over pasta about Klingon gagh and the fucking parasitic worms over in Guinea-Bissau! No, don’t gimme that look, I know what you guys will pull over there at SHIELD when Jensen is bored to tears. You’re the getaway man, I know what your kind get up to, stealing Volkswagons when you’re _five_ years old and leaving them on the roof of the Dean’s Office and shit like that--no excuses, you did it, we both know that you’d do it again, am I right?”

“I was eight. There was this slope, I didn’t know--”

“You are a lying liar who lies, you were _five,_ and couldn’t even reach the pedals.”

Well, that’s a big old tell. He never recites the story saying that he was _five._ Somebody’s been out to chat with Jolene’s mother, God help them all. She has opinions about Pooch’s ancestry, his upbringing, and his level of brain-damaged, addlepated belief that he’s immortal. Pooch scrubs at his forehead. She’s wrong, by the way. Just listen in on any of their gigs, check on their radio feeds, anybody could hear if the Pooch believes he can die. He thinks he’s going to die _all the time._ That’s because he’s the _sane_ one.

Tony points a stern finger at him. “Don’t talk to me about Cougar either. I have too many gray hairs already. I know Barton’s stunts, and Cougar’s another of those cray-cray-beyond-crayon crazy cranky sniper.”

Pooch chuckles, shaking his head. “Oh, yeah, get him to consult on new ammo.”

Tony shakes a forefinger at him. “Exactly. Shit, I’ve had six dozen different Company guys telling me wacko shit about Cougar’s ops, trying to scare us off to stop SHIELD stealing him, so let’s just leave it at that, shall we? And the less said the better about Wee Willie Roque’s infamous chemistry sets, yeah? Good, glad we got that sorted out.” He looks at the monitors again, chuckled, pointing at it. “There’s a guy who could work anywhere he wants-- until he blows up their lab cause he’s bored. Then again, it’s not like you find any Spec Ops guys just begging for rent money.”

“Except when you do. After Jake’s-- little adventure-- highly _classified_ adventure--”

Tony holds up open hands. “I said I would not ask unless you guys wanted to talk. No fishing, this is me refusing to engage, this is me being good. No silly stuff about experimental aircraft that scared shit out of the Russians, oh no. Nope, I’m not fishing. Colonel Fury put the fear of God in me about this one, I swear that man gets crankier every week. _La la lalala,_ not asking. No, no, no.”

“Time for coffee,” Pooch says, stretching. His palms are still faintly buzzing. Everything is dragging, his reaction speed is completely out of whack. You don’t notice, doing that brain-drain thing with Tony, that you’ve completely run out of go-juice until you’ve faceplanted on the floor and wonder _whahdafuck_ happened. “Maybe we can catch Clay, see what he says about Jensen briefing you on the... on the stuff he saw.”

“Always a good time for more coffee,” Tony says, and switches off a couple of small tools, gives a big wave at one wall, and the lights go down. JARVIS cuts the power to most of the rest, leaving just a few dim lights leading to the exit and the elevator.

“Tony?”

“Yeah, man?”

“Thanks. I needed that.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Yeah, I hear you. If you feel like working on the wheel rims some more when I’m out, JARVIS can let you in.”

“Thanks, man.” Pooch blinks stupidly in the elevator.

“Oh hey, head on upstairs, get some food and stuff, take a load off. I’m just gonna drop off for a minute in the lab--”

But the elevator door won’t open at that floor for him.

JARVIS merely says, “What would Captain America say?”

Tony growls, thumps the door, and folds his arms. “Why did I ever build you, you ungrateful pile of crap egotistical AI code--”

“There is a secure tablet computer available in the kitchen area,” JARVIS says, sounding very apologetic and about as yielding as the steel doors.

Tony glares up at Pooch. “I hate these stupid arguments, like I need a babysitter--”

“Coffee,” Pooch says, nodding.

“Yeah, right.” Tony scrubs his hands through his hair, exasperated. “Coffee’s a good idea. Yeah.”

“You totally do,” Pooch says, blinking sleepily. “Need one.”

“Yeah?” Tony snaps.

“Yeah. Babysitter. My brother's kid, he gets like this. Won’t sleep, no sirree. Doesn’t want to miss the party.”

“What, so you take him out stealing Volkswagons?”

Pooch grins. “No such luck, nope. Jolene’d kill me. Then her mother would run over the body. Her mother would set fire to the mess. Nope. I just put him in the car seat in my wife’s restored sixty-eight Camaro. That deep old grumble, you know? Two minutes, he’s out cold.”

Tony tilts his head back. “Yeah, and you got the heavy-duty shocks and radiator, right? Feel like you’re bolted onto the road, like you’re hitting every last rock and pit and crack.” He holds out his hands, peels back his lips like he’s the Grateful Dead skeleton braced out on motorcycle grips, jolting along a bad stretch of washboard road, and he starts making that distinctive growling engine noise, _racketa-racketa-racketa._

“Do a road trip longer than fifty miles and it’ll rattle your fillings out,” Pooch agrees.

Tony points at him. “But hey, get the right tires and you could drive the damn thing up a brick wall.”

“Jolene likes it like that, even if it kills her spine sitting way down in that bucket seat. She talks to it. No problem if it eats gas like it’s raw meat, spits out spark plugs every other week, never mind the road salt chews hell out of the chassis every winter so it gets welded every year and the chassis replaced every fourth year, and the body’s so low slung she’s always getting stuck in snowplow piles, yadda yadda yadda. That’s her car, and that’s the last word.”

“I guess she’d have to be stubborn, huh? Just to put up with your Spec Ops sorry ass.”

Pooch snorts. “She knows what she wants.”

The doors open.

“Speaking of ladies who know their own minds,” Tony says wryly.

Natasha and Pepper are leaning against a kitchen counter, looking at him, arms folded.

“Right, I’ll get on that coffee thing,” Pooch says, and ducks out of the way.

“Good. I like a man who clears the field of battle promptly.” Pepper unfolds her arms. One hand is holding one high heeled shoe in fluorescent red, the other is holding one in lime green. “Pick one.”

On second thought, tired as he was, who needed coffee?

“Yeah, run away!” Tony jeers after him.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hacker nickname J-Mageddon here makes him an AU version of a Jake that never got to be in the Losers. He's in LadyJanelly's fabulous AU story Walk a While with Me, where he rescued Cougar. That's here.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/series/22426


	2. Jennifer Says The Petunias Won

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark's Tower has a great view, order-in deli, Godiva chocolates, and all the hacking work Jake can bite off, plus more.  
> Also, it's really hard to tire out Steve, but they're trying to.

Cougar is stretched across JJ’s couch, boots off, hat tilted downward, right next to the giant window that reaches from the ceiling to the tiled floor. He’s not sure where the air louvers pull from, but the air smells of outside, drafting over him in gusts like he’s in a sheltered spot on a roof somewhere. The air is always still when they walk in, but JARVIS gets it going for him as soon as he settles on this couch, or in his own Tower suite. He can gaze down across a good chunk of city traffic from here, well above many of the older roofs. It’s nearly as good as sitting in surveillance on a mission. He would never drift off during that, but lately he’s been settling into naps in the afternoon sun when he’s alone in his own room.

Hard not to drop off, with nothing to think about and his stomach full and every last muscle wiped out after workouts with Steve and Jake. They’re big, but they’re not slow. Steve has been teaching them what he learned from the Russians and French Resistance folks he worked with, from the Howling Commandos, and lately from Natasha and Clint. Sometimes Cougar and Jake run another extra sparring session at night with Steve, who drops in from his apartment in the city when he gets restless. Apparently he doesn’t sleep much.

Cougar is not sleeping nights, but it sounds like nobody is, not very much. It’s kind of nice to know his team is around, doing things where he can find them, because the suites are all dead quiet without some kind of music going. But the living room or the kitchen or in the workout room always has somebody puttering around, doing things, bickering with each other, sometimes playing computer games or throwing food at each other, and there’s a glorious mess of books to read. He has a thick book on motorcycles of the 1950’s on his stomach right now. Not sure why somebody picked that up, but the diagrams are elegant.

“You know you don’t have to watch for anything up here, right?” Jake says, looking up from his laptop. “You can just sleep. JARVIS and I have got you.”

Cougar tilts up the hat brim, surprised. Jake’s been working about five hours this stretch, since they showered after their afternoon workout. Jake usually runs longer in his hacking zone before he comes out of the trance this far.

“Really, we got you.”

Cougar frowns. “¿Qué?”

“If you’re tired, just sleep.”

“But you need to concentrate on your computer,” Cougar says, which is careless of him. He could have kicked himself for saying that the moment it escaped.

Jake just looks at him, round glass eyeglass lenses reflecting light so it’s impossible to read the expression in his eyes. “You’re staying up because you think I need you sitting guard at my back.”

“No, no, I just--” Cougar struggles for words, reaching out one arm to sit up. “I think it is easier for you to slide into the work, it goes faster, yes?”

Jake is across the floor before Cougar has made it all the way to sitting up. Jake rests a hand on Cougar’s shoulder, and it’s a very big hand. Cougar is suddenly, horribly, aware of how it is pushing into his collarbone. Jake could break that bone like a puny stick, and they both know it.

Jake hastily lifts his hand off. “Sorry. Look, it’s okay, no big deal right now, nothing urgent. I’ve set up compiling jobs, just gotta wait for it. I have a couple flight simulators Tony sent me but he’s a tough player. Don’t want to start that stuff until I’m a little sharper on the reflexes, when I’ve got some rest. Do you mind if I just zone out awhile here too?”

“Sí, no hay problema,” Cougar says, relieved, and pulls up his knees more to give room at the other end of the couch. He picks up the book, yawns, holds it out. “Motorcycles?”

“Oh yeah, Pooch was talking about this,” Jake says, flopping down into the remaining space on the couch cushions. He starts flipping the book open between four different pages in turn. “They need some 3D work on borrowing later era schematics to upgrade one of the bikes that Tony is repairing--” There’s three minutes of trivia about bearing strength of iron stock for rods supporting the axles. Clearly Jake is happily engrossed in comparing the pictures and will be good for hours more, until the hacker runs himself down to sleep, still talking. And yes, Jake talks in his sleep too.

Before he finishes thinking that, Cougar is out cold, hands limp in his lap.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jake’s voice says. There’s a noisy yawn, and a crackle of paper. Mumbling noises come from a cell phone. Weight shifts on the other end of the couch, and Cougar feels big warm sock feet shifting around, threading between his ankles and snuggling close between his shins. It feels good. The cool air drafting in across his shoulders smells of night.

“Yeah, he’s here. Don’t wanna wake him up, he’s having a good nap.” He chuckles. “Yeah, that feral cat thing. Go in another room, you look around, and there he is.” He puts on a silly voice. “‘I meant to be here anyway, fucker, what are _you_ looking at?’”

He listens a moment, laughs softly. “Oh yeah. And forget about trying to eat your own stuff without him stealing it outta your bowl right under your nose. Now just a minute--whaddya mean, more chocolate? Tony has him mainlining the best stuff in the world just to keep him settled. No way can I compete there. Forget trying to wean Cougs off the hard stuff here, and go back to regular brown crayon candy in bags. Man, you shoulda seen him licking the ganache outta the shell on Godivas the other night. Fuckin’ chocolate bombs, man. Yeah, he was, in the living room, just after swimming, so his hair’s all curly and there’s miles of tan cat muscles lolling on the couch. Yeah, just the hat. Okay, over a bitty pair of lycra shorts that might as well be a bandaid. _Look_ at me and lick out another candy with his tongue. Anybody else, it’d look _stupid._ How fair is that? Ruin any porn you _ever_ thought you’d watch in the future, ever. Pooch told him to stop practicing for the world title in public, ran off in a hurry to go talk to Jolene. Well, yeah, he does that a lot.” The phone murmurs for awhile, and Jake sighs.

“Sure, he misses her. I guess they worked it out at some point. He said she was gonna kill him, then her mother would run over the remains, and then her grandmother would set fire to the trampled-down mess. So yeah, there musta been some serious yelling. I guess he wasn’t fooling about that one. The other day I picked up the phone in the kitchen for something, and it was a party line right then. I got an earful of Southern going on and Pooch saying, _yes ma’am,_ in that voice you do when you’re getting a real old fashioned talking to-- God, _terrifying,_ and I put that phone down with a bang. You know, I thought none of these hardline circuits are party lines. I just have to wonder if JARVIS wanted me to hear all that shit.”

Jake shifts on the couch, turning his shoulders. “Who’s JARVIS? Umm, complicated. The butler. With extra superpowers. Which, honestly, around this place, you’d really need-- no, I don’t think _everybody_ has superpowers, I don’t! Have you heard me bitching about the massed collective intelligence at CENTCOM? Okay, yes, but the Losers are just awesome like that. Cougar’s clearly got the whole seduction extra-plus-plus man-smex package good for knocking out any and all sentient beings with a fricken heartbeat, and Pooch got the Speaker-to-Machines boxed special, and Roque stole a Klingon alien thingie with extra blades included-- Well, so do you! You know, the mom package with the zapping shoes around corners and seeing everything when you weren’t there and the completely 360-degree wrongdoing vision behind your head thing--” he laughs. “If you didn’t get the message before, I miss you guys too.” He listens for awhile. “So how’s those semifinals going? Gimme some good news here, tell me the Petunias pulled it together-- please pretty pretty please with a sugar frosting flower on top-- Uh huh? Yeah?” He starts laughing, very soft, listening, excited, and wiggles in place like a dog about to pounce on a toy. Then he rears up off the cushions, kicks himself off the seat hard enough to rock the couch in place, and leaps in the air, bangs the ceiling with a fist and an ear-splitting whoop of triumph. He starts dancing around the room and fist-pumping with regular yells. “YES! My niece is da bomb! Yes! Yes! Who’s yo mama now!”

Cougar sighs, sits up, holds out an imperious hand, wiggles his fingers.

Jake dumps his cell phone into Cougar’s palm and continues to jump in giant springs around the floor, batting at the ceiling occasionally at full extension, with banging noises. It’s alarming to watch, so Cougar doesn’t.

“Señora Jennifer?” Cougar says, curling his feet under him and hugging himself to keep warm in the draft of cold night air, pressing the phone at one ear. “Congratulations to you and mi amiga.”

Jake, in the background, is chanting undignified phrases interspersed with,”PEH-toooo-nyas, Rah!”

“Thank you,” Jennifer’s voice says in his ear. “You know, that’s a really nice phone. I can hear every word he’s yelling right now--”

“Beth, Beth, Beth my gal’s da bomb, Beth--”

“Sí,” Cougar says. “Will there be cake?”

“There will.”

“With ponies?” Cougar says patiently.

“Indeed,” she says, interrupted by Jake yelling something about Bronies forever. And then she starts chuckling, and gets louder, and finally she busts into longer, sustained laughter as if she can’t help it.

Cougar lowers the phone, gazing at it a moment. Then he glances up under the hat brim at Jake, who shows a decent improvement in his stamina over the last week, because he doesn’t seem to be slowing down in jumping about. Cougar returns the phone to his ear.

“Muy bien. We should send mi amiga something, a gift.”

“Oh, no need, please, since JJ admitted he was back in the real world and actually, like, alive and able to talk to us, he’s been sending stuff he ordered online like a mad Santa Claus.”

“Mmm,” Cougar says, thinking about it. It would be hard to find something appropriate that Jake hasn’t already sent off to them.

“Cougar?”

“¿Sí, mi amiga?”

“Thanks.”

“¿Por qué?”

Jennifer starts laughing softly. “Everything. Being there. Licking chocolates at him.”

Cougar lifts both eyebrows.

Apparently she has the superpower of seeing this in the silence, with the phone's video blocked against his ear, because she chuckles again. “Yes, if you’re asking, I am totally on board with you roping in my little brother and riding him like a boss and making him very, very happy. I mean, in case you were asking.”

Cougar settles more firmly with one elbow propped on his knee. “It is not hard to make him happy,” he says at last, and he knows his amusement is coming through clearly.

“God knows that’s true,” Jennifer agrees, sighing. “You seem to be able to get through to him better than anybody else in his entire life, and I include myself in this motley crew, okay?”

“Okay,” Cougar says. After a moment, he says, “Is this a gift you could accept?”

There’s a long silence. “Yeah, it is.”

“Okay,” Cougar says.

“Like you have any say, huh?” Jennifer says wryly.

“Oh,” Cougar says, and again the smile is probably showing in his tone. “It was just a matter of… time, really…” Time, and a certain amount of affronted pride. Will Pooch ever stop laughing once he finds out? And Roque. Cougar rubs his eyes. He has some idea how badly they’re going to get teased, and what kind of inventive mayhem Jake will unleash in response, and… and of course Jennifer knows her brother well enough to anticipate all of that.

“If you had any common sense you’d run for the hills,” Jennifer says, chuckling.

He gives a little cough. “If I had any common sense I wouldn’t be one of the Losers.”

“Clearly true, mi amigo.”

Cougar is visited with a sudden wave of longing. He wishes they were there right now, at the scarred yellow kitchen table in Jennifer’s crowded little house which he has never seen in person, only videos or by phone. Cougar has helped Beth and her worried young Chechen babysitter with Beth’s homework, while Jake was also busy, over-stretched on rush projects. Through Jennifer’s phone image, he is looking at all the brightly colored kid-things crammed into shelves in every available corner. It’s so tiny a place in all the videos that Jake has showed him.

“Have you talked to your family?” Jennifer asks softly.

Cougar leans harder on his elbow. With his other thumb he traces a seam on his jeans where the thread has worn through. “No.”

She breathes a hard snort into that long silence. “Do you want Jolene or me to call them, bring them up to speed before the media down there can get hold of them?”

“Thank you, but… I sent my sisters an email when we first… when we first got here.”

“Well, tell me to butt out when I’m getting on your nerves, please, amigo, because I’m a meddler by nature, and I can’t imagine _anybody_ not wanting to see you and hug your stuffings out. Just to let you know, I think you’re overdue some really good luck, and you guys must come visit as soon as you can.”

“Thank you, Jennifer,” he says, and feels a hand come down on his shoulder. Another hand is extended in front of him, demanding, and he yields up the cell phone silently.

Jake walks off very fast into the bathroom suite, closes the door, and starts hissing rapidly into the phone. Possibly he thinks Cougar can’t hear him, but most people underestimate how well he can hear them. Apparently he’s angry at his sister now, as angry now as he was overjoyed before, and it’s about something she said to Cougar.

Cougar can’t figure out what he’s upset about. Things are as they are. He hasn’t even tried to keep that a secret, there’s no point. Roque knows where his next of kin live, he does all the paperwork, and Clay signed off on it. They’ve never asked why Cougar doesn’t go to visit his parents in Calexico on his downtime, even when the Losers happen to be close in LA or San Diego, or God help them, Yuma… during the worst of the monsoon heat in Arizona.

Nobody is going to let him get on a plane to France to visit those of his sisters who really would be happy to see him since Grand-mère’s death. There’s very little point in getting the girls all riled up and excited when he can’t promise to come visit for an unknown indeterminate time. It was easier to fly out of Algiers or Novosibirsk to see them five years ago. Now, after the NSA flap? From New York? Not likely. Not until the uproar settles enough to see Ross removed from power and his thugs disbanded.

Cougar can’t see that happening for a long time.

When Jake finally comes out of the bathroom, phone closed, Cougar has curled up on the couch and pulled his hat down low. Jake just looks at him a moment, walks back into the bedroom, returns with a blanket, and drapes it over Cougar’s legs. Cougar stirs. “Gracias.”

“Get some rest, I’ll check on those compiling jobs,” Jake says.

“Sí,” Cougar mumbles and turns on his side, pulling the blanket up around his shoulders. Then he takes off the hat, sets it on the back of the couch. “Jake.”

“Yeah, Cougs?”

“‘s okay.”

Jake stands there, arms folded. He seems very tall, looming in the dim light. “Okay.”

Cougar smiles. “Petunias, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jake says. He leans down, tugs the blanket higher, pats Cougar’s shoulder. “Petunias rule, man.” And he goes back to his laptop, humming a little under his breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompted by convo with the awesome artist slashersivi who made an illo for my chapter 5 here, I was reminded that I perhaps should add an "Inspired By" note about one of Loser's fandom major pieces  
> .  
> This series influenced a lot of us on fanon that's taken for granted, it has that much impact.  
> The names of Jensen's sister and niece here are a small tribute to that piece.
> 
> The series, "Team Dynamics, Family, and Other Things That Will Hurt You" is by pistol.  
> First piece here.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/332652
> 
> Continuing here, "We Know How It Works (the world is no longer mysterious)"  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/318050


	3. This House Could Use Some Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake thinks Cougar is not exactly passing the evaluation exam for normal life right now.

 

Cougar ghosts up the peeling wooden steps just like a cat with the fur all fluffed, poised with his knees bent, ready to leap back at a wrong noise. The steps don’t even creak under his weight, not even the second board that always sounds like the crack of doom. Da Fuck, he’s even sniffing the air, all those Spec Ops assassin muscles ready to jump, clearly worried about what’s hiding behind Door Number Two.

Well, it’s just going to be Jake’s sister Jennifer, with any luck--although, God knows, they’ve had enough nasty surprises that solid doors have kinda become a thang when the Losers are twitchy.

Jake isn’t sure why Cougar is twitchy now, after the long drive up here, with plenty of time to discuss what to expect and air some speculations on what Jennifer might ask Cougar and to explain the layout of the house like it’s a raid target, and answer all his questions, including the ones he didn’t ask. It didn’t seem to reassure Cougar as much as Jake expected it to.

Of course it’s normal for Cougar to ask about placement of doors and windows in relation to where Beth and Jennifer sleep, and where he and Jensen will set up in the guest room. Cougar doesn’t mind sharing the bed, he just wants the side next to the window, where there’s a shelf for his weapons and his locked case. Egress in an emergency is important. Being Losers, if somebody decides to attack them at the house--which is far from impossible, if Max is still after them--then Cougar wants to be sure they’ll have it all sorted out. He was careful about figuring where he wants to store his weapons safely but where he can instantly put his hand on them.

Cougar should be expert on the house’s layout by now, after days of watching all those ridiculous videos of Beth and Jennifer dancing around the house, sewing up princess skirts and doing dishes and repeating Spanish phrases to Dora the Explorer cartoons. Oh, and there was an especially devastating vid of Beth on the couch, all rumpled, snoring, out cold after finally crashing from the sugar high of birthday cake and ice cream and a horde of soccer buddies roaring through the house. Man, that kid has plus 26 deadly in emotional manipulation, even when she’s down for the count.

Cougar actually reached out and touched Jake’s laptop screen, right where Beth’s face showed above the floppy bear she was hugging in her sleep. And he made this weird little noise under his breath, like he couldn’t help himself. Then he looked at Jake with this strange pained expression, like Jake had hit him unfairly, sucker-punched him or something, and he’d stalked out and disappeared for the rest of the day. Didn’t even show up for his workout with Steve.

Of course he was hiding up on the Tower roof somewhere. Jake knew that if he wanted to talk he’d have showed up when Jake went up and sat for awhile on the patio chairs, but he didn’t. He didn’t come out until Steve went up there later that night. At that, it took Steve waiting two hours for him to appear.

Something about how family can be tough to deal with, that was all Steve said about it.

Cougar reaches up to the screen door like he’s defusing a bomb. Yeah, let’s just say Cougar is not exactly passing the evaluation exam for normal life right now. Jennifer is going to eat him alive if he doesn’t give up the Spec Ops Spooky Shit and stop being so jumpy.

Jake shifts competing duffle bag straps on his shoulders, staggers up, kicks the steps, provokes the crack of doom creak from the second step, and grins when the sniper glares at him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m an asshole, get used to it,” Jake says happily. He thumps the door frame. The bell hasn’t worked for years.

There’s a yell from inside the house. Jennifer’s voice floats out of the window screens by the door. “It’s ooopen, I’ll be there in a minute.”

Cougar looks on either side at the rusty dark screens on the windows, shocked. If you squint, you can see past the screens that the windows are wide open. One of the crooked window sashes is propped on a stick to keep it up. Why yes, the whole place is wide open. Well, no surprise, it’s still relatively cool, and Jennifer tries to air the place out on weekend mornings, before the humidity gets too far out of hand. Cougar spins around on the porch--still no noise from the creaky boards--and glares at Jensen like he’s left his sister abandoned to the mercies of every criminal gang in New York.

The glare is punctuated by a trill of birdsong from the hedges nearby.

Cougar glares at that instead. He doesn’t like hedges either, not that close to the house. It’s a windbreak, for crying out loud--you need to plant them pretty close to what it’s supposed to be sheltering for it to work, not four hundred yards away, even though the fire safety folks want them further yet.

Cougar turns the accusing gaze on Jake at last.

_How could you?_

Really, by Cougar’s standards, a heavy fence on bald ground, reinforced by some blockhouses on stilts with some decent machine guns, are the very least that a guy could do to improve a rural property this far out in the country. When you have enemies like Max, there ought to be at least a line of motion detectors, remote cameras, good thick rolls of barbed wire, and a couple of well-marked strings of mines, right?

Jake grins crookedly. Man, he knew Cougar wasn’t ready for civilian life, but this is getting pretty funny.

Cougar’s not amused. He’s really _not._

Jake finally has mercy on the poor sniper. “Wanna grab some of the other bags and stuff?”

Cougar is gone off those steps in a flash, scampering back along the side of the car, and back around to the open trunk. Yeah, loitering, rummaging back there for awhile. Jeez, you’d think he was in some telenovela with a pregnant girlfriend, dragging his boots really bad and trying to delay meeting his novia’s gun-toting abuelo or something.

Jake snorts, wrestles with the screen door, gets the unreliable knob of the wooden door open, and starts whistling his favorite pony theme as he stomps along the main spine of the house, heading for the back and the guest room. He dumps bags with a sigh.

“You guys are early,” Jennifer says, appearing at the door of the kitchen, mopping her hair back from her eyes. “C’mere, you.”

Jake disentangles himself from the last strap, thumps back up the hallway, gathers her up in a big hug, picks her up off her feet. “Eeeeeyaaaah!” he growls, and puts her down again.

“You, you, you,” Jennifer says, smacking his shoulders with both hands. “What _am_ I gonna do with you?”

“Feed me and play videogames with me and hug me and call me George,” Jake says, with great satisfaction, and hugs her again. “Hey, I brought the extension on that pathetic lame unicorn-infested fantasy game you like--”

Jennifer growls at him, pinches his ear, smacks his arms again. “Where’s my buddy Cougar?”

“He’s hiding,” Jake says.

“What? What did you tell him?”

“I told him Baba Yaga got nothing on you, you eat little kids for a snack.”

“Ehhh, no, I don’t, they’re too puny. Too much snot and not enough cartilage. I only like great big guys who got some marrow in their bones.” She pinches his ear, frowns. “Too skinny!”

“Teachers, man, can’t do a thing with ‘em,” Jake says.

There’s a soft sound in the hallway, and when they turn, they see Cougar standing just inside the screen door, putting Army duffles on the floor. The light from the windows slants across his face and flares honey-colored in his eyes, even under the hat. He smiles, slowly, marvelously, and his body leans forward eagerly. He’s suddenly all angular and a little gawky, like the teenager he must have been. And he must have been devastating as a teenager, because he’s a shock in this house. He looks so big! He’s the smallest guy in the Losers, but not if you see him here, on a normal scale, with normal stuff. His shoulders shift and he takes a breath and he’s suddenly walking toward them, holding out his hand with all the considerable muscle bulging in his forearm, and he is… God, he’s just… he’s like a bolt of sizzling hot life moving at them.

“My God--” Jennifer says, blinking. Then she’s blinking down at his hand, taking it. The gun callouses surprise her all over again. “I had no idea--” And then she puts up her other hand and rests it on his shoulder, and slides it around onto his back, and then she’s hugging Cougar. And he is, by God, letting her do it. Then he lifts one arm around her, and he’s hugging her back, and he’s saying something in Spanish. “Gracias,” he says, when he draws back. He’s taller than her by several inches, and she’s not a small woman, but she has to look up at him.

She grips his shoulders, just as she did with Jake, and she peers up at him. “My God, no wonder,” she says distractedly. “I mean, Jake sent me some vids, but I had no idea. Um, right-- that explains a lot, it really does-- okay, have you guys eaten already on the road? What did you want for lunch?”

Cougar just looks at her, taking his time, and finally he smiles at her. Then he just wraps both arms around her again, hugging her carefully, and he says, “The yard smells all lavender.”

“Does it? Oh, yeah, from doing laundry. I put in a good chunk of real extract oil, it’s a great disinfectant for soccer shorts, you know, ” she says, patting him on the back gently.

Jake had warned her that Cougar’s got some weird reactions from bad experiences, and not to grab him like she normally would, and thank God she seems to have taken it seriously. But this is all right. Cougar seems to be okay with this. When they draw apart, Cougar nods to her, takes off his hat, and says, “Jake says you are a wizard with corned beef.”

“After all the fancy delis there in New York, you want to try plain old corned beef here?”

“And deviled eggs and potato salad,” he says solemnly, and there’s a little crinkle at the corners of his eyes.

Jennifer lifts a skeptical eyebrow. “Yeah? I think you missed something.”

“Aahhh. Chocolate cake. Hmm. And lemon pie?”

Jennifer turns the eyebrow on Jake instead. “And those are in a box, no less, not homemade. Best I could do on short notice.”

Jake holds up both hands. “Told you he’s the super-sniffer ninja, you can’t sneak up on him with the stealth cooking attack.”

“Yeah, you warned me about that, I got it,” Jennifer agrees, and smacks Jake on the arm. She beckons them after her, into the kitchen.

“See? Toldja!” Jake hisses at his buddy.

The sniper ignores him in favor of checking out the kitchen. His gaze snaps around in the same order as he recites specs for raids: Doors, windows, Jennifer, cabinets, fridge, stove.

“A list of warnings?” Cougar says, glancing around again, picky about it, as if he’s checking on how things have changed. Absolutely he’s comparing it to her videos.

Jennifer gives him a sharp look. “Sure. You know we won’t escape Jake’s lists.”

Cougar looks back at Jake and smiles. “Sí. We rely on these lists.”

Jake finds himself blushing furiously, for no reason, and he coughs into his hand and looks aside, but he knows he’s not fooling Jennifer’s sharp eye one bit.

“When did you paint?” Cougar asks, craning his head upward. Checking for air ducts, of course.

Jennifer grins. “Two months ago, when Jolene stayed with us for a month so she’d rest and take care of her skinny lil pregnant self. That girl cannot sit still.”

Cougar nods. “Pooch begged her to say yes to your invitation. He didn’t want her to stay home and get run off her feet all day, the way she does with family visiting her.”

Jake is staring at Cougar in shock. So many words! Cougar talks!

Jennifer just nods, pulling tall glasses out of a cupboard. “So, you guys hungry?”

“Always!” Jake says, outraged. How could she not _know_ this?

Cougar’s mouth quirks just a fraction. Oh, he knows Jake is watching him.

“As for sandwiches, it just so happens I bought some fancy mustard. Why don’t you guys put your bags back in the room and wash up? I’ll start pulling stuff out of the fridge.”

Cougar nods, gives a little wave with the hat, and flees the kitchen.

“My God, woman, you used an invisible shrink ray and turned Cougar back to twelve years old,” Jake says.

“Be careful. I better not turn it on you, you only made it up to fifteen in the first place.” Heartless, cruel older sister completely armored in her unfair plus-19 Shield of Sibling-Destroying Insults, she totally ignores his spluttering. In fact, Jennifer starts humming the Vader theme-song while she’s peering into the fridge as she pulls out condiment jars. “What did I say? Scoot!”

Jake scoots. Accusing her of dealing with kids too long and losing all her adult-wrangling skills will not help his cause, and might result in a devastating failure to produce chocolate cake. He grabs the rest of the luggage in the living room and hauls it back.

Cougar comes out of the first floor bathroom tying his hair back out of his eyes with a black elastic band. He looks odd walking around without the hat on, younger, skinnier somehow.

“Okay?” Jake asks.

Cougar turns away, but he’s got his usual smirk on. “Sí. Es bueno.”

“Cougs, you know Jennifer speaks more Spanish than I do--”

“Sí, you told me,” Cougar says. The smirk widens. “I won’t hit on your sister.”

“But you’ll think about it, huh?” Jake reaches out to poke, and misses. He always misses.

There’s the smile. “I’d have to be dead not to.”

“Asshole,” Jake says.

Cougar makes a quick sign with his fingers that Jake will have to look up later, damn it. He’s been slowly teaching Jake more bits of American Sign, like it or lump it, just to keep up with him. Just like he’s been hammering bits and pieces of Spanish into Jake’s resistant brain, in spite of traumas past from horrible eighth-grade teachers. He grouses at Cougar about Spanish teachers with weird Russian Republic accents, while he flings bags around and unpacks the presents they brought along.

When he comes out of the bathroom, hands still damp, he sees Cougar sitting on the guest room bed, twisting around and checking his reach to the window sill and the shelf beside it. Jeez, the guy never gives up, does he? Jake sighs and heads for the kitchen instead of hassling about it.

“You know what I really want?” Jake says.

“Iced tea, three spoons of sugar,” Jennifer replies. She plonks the glass down on the table in front of him. Condensing moisture beads up and runs down the side of it.

“You read my mind.”

“Not much knocking around in there to get confused about,” Jennifer says.

“What is it with the put-downs? Have you been watching Laverne and Shirley reruns again?”

“Always,” she says, rinsing something in the sink.

“¿Disculpe? Can I help?” Cougar says then, making them both jump.

“Crack ice cubes out of another tray,” she says, and points at the fridge. “Please.”

“You got her to say _please!”_ Jensen says.

Cougar just delivers a smoldering look down his nose. _But of course. Am I not amazing? Do I not have superpowers over anything of the female gender?_

Wait, wait-- let’s be factual, it’s _not_ just over creatures of the feminine persuasion. Jake has seen this same snooty cat-footed guy wheedle his way past cranky Brahma bulls, bloody-tusked wild boars, and glowering Brass. He coaxed Jake’s medical release papers out of that whole team of scowling VA doctors somehow, and Cougar didn’t say twenty words.

It was all in the pauses, or something. He just listened and nodded a lot, and… _looked_ at them. Something about the dress uniform blouse with that crucial little President’s 100 tab on it, along with a few other permanent tabs. And the posture, too, standing up very straight with the hair all tied up firmly under the hat, somehow looking skinny and hungry and badly in need of home cooking.

“Jake’s sister... hoping… can’t afford… laid off as a teacher…”

Cougar can make two hundred and fifty pounds of evil bone--it seems to be all elbows and steel-toed boots when you’re on the wrong end of it in a melee--look like he’s thirteen and he begs in a favela in Rio. Because, of course, he has, for the sake of reconnaissance during an op. Just look at those solemn, reproachful eyes.

“...Jake covered the bills for ten months...”

It’s completely unfair. Clay curses him out when he pulls it on them. Usually he’s too fucking proud to stoop to it at home, so what Clay gets is either Silent Deadeye Dick or the Cat Who Walked By Himself, fuck-you-very-much.

Of course Cougar could get Jennifer to say please, he’s a _guest,_ and she isn’t going to forget that. Because he won’t let her forget that. Because he will _act like one._

Jake shakes his head, looking aside from the eyes that never, ever blink in a staring contest. Snipers, man. And don’t play pool with him, either.

“Perdón,” the sniper says then, and strolls away to the old fridge.

It makes noises and always needs defrosting. Of nearly the same era, the ice cube trays are old scarred metal jobs she picked up at garage sales. They still work fine. They just need a powerful hand grip to work, not suited for all the old folks retired in the area. Sometimes, not suited for Jennifer’s hands either, any more. Cougar cracks the ice into a pitcher for her. He glances up at the window over the sink, where the screen is wobbling a bit in and out of the frame with each puff of the breeze.

He’s not frowning, which would be rude; instead, he’s got this odd blank expression that means a lot is boiling around in there but he doesn’t want anybody to notice. Yet. Not a good sign. It usually means a whole lot of work ahead, because dammit, the man really is a sergeant under all that languid feline ease. He’s not afraid to make everybody else jump to it and fix things when _he_ thinks it needs doing.

Yep, sure thing--he looks over at the screen door at the back of the kitchen like he’s checking on what else needs doing, and bingo, then he looks at the fan wobbling atop the fridge, and then he looks down at the floor, where the linoleum is a tripping hazard--

Then he looks at Jake with that blank look, waiting for something.

“You want some tea?” Jennifer says, not even watching, but she knows.

Cougar looks at her and it’s ridiculous how the blank expression just melts away into this warm, soft, affectionate gaze. His eyes crinkle up. He’s just pouring out the luurrrve at her. “Yes, please. Two spoons.”

She chuckles. “Got it. Why don’t you guys get down the cutting board and some plates, and we’ll get started whacking this beef. Who cuts thinnest, you or Jake?”

“Cougs the surgeon here. What? Seriously, this guy is a wiz, you should see him sew up cuts, it’s so neat and precise, you’d be amazed.” Jake hands Cougar the cutting board.

“Oh, then I should have him cut up the chicken for dinner tonight. My hands are bothering me.”

Cougar takes the knife Jennifer gives him, tests it on his thumb, hoists one eyebrow.

Smiling a little, she hands him a chef’s steel.

The eyebrow eases down, and he nods, and spends some time making noise with it. “Hmm,” he says, rinsing the blade under the kitchen tap, and then he applies it to the platter of corned beef in neat, tidy lines. A wave of his hand indicates it is ready for Jake to step in and start loading it onto the condiment-heavy bread.

“Chicken now?” he says to Jennifer. Then, “Onions?”

Cougar is kind of scary with a knife. Not waving it around, Roque-style. No extra movements at all, no nonsense. _Wham_ , rrrip, k-chunk. Three minutes and the chicken parts are rinsed, the knife is washed, and it’s whirring through onions at speed. Jennifer isn’t that fast on a cutting board, not since she started having tendonitis in her wrists.

Jennifer coaxes him. “Show me what you’d use for a marinade, I’m tired of my own stuff.”

Five more minutes more, once she’s dug out what he asks for, and the pieces are back in the fridge, soaking in a bastard mixture of soy sauce, mustard, black pepper, ketchup, Worcestershire, dry soup mix, nearly all of her spice powders, and onions. Jennifer apologizes that she had no garlic left, and no hot sauces or chile powders to, as they both talk about it, ‘round out the flavor.’

He assures her he will find some for her when they go shopping again.

Jake is, frankly, astonished. “How come you never cook like that when we’re out in the back of beyond somewhere?”

“No tools,” Cougar says, with a disdainful sniff. “Grasshoppers and goat. Don’t tell Roque.”

“Oh, like I’m gonna give away your super sekrit ninja barbecueing mad skillz!”

Cougar turns a dark gaze on him. “This? You have not seen barbecue yet.” He turns to Jennifer. “I saw the kettle and the hibachi, outside. Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

He nods, washing the knife and cutting board with soap. “If you don’t mind my using--?”

She smiles. “Officially? I don’t care _what_ you do to my brother, I’m keeping you, forever and ever amen.”

“Without tasting?”

She just laughs. Jennifer was a fry cook before she had Beth, and she’s gone back to that whenever the local school district lays her off. She knows what she’s watching. When he points, Jennifer hands across the little fry pan, then butter.

Cougar sorts out chicken innards in the store bag, points for Jennifer to pick up the black pepper and dust it on some of the mess he’s holding over the sink. “More there,” he says.

“You did time in somebody’s restaurant, right?”

Cougar sighs. “Mi tía abuela, she ran a bodega for years. Tapas, beer nuts, cheese everything, little sweets, three kinds of wings.” He gives a wry smile. The liver makes a hiss as he lays it in the hot buttered pan. He washes his hands with soap. “Still can’t handle buffalo wings--” he makes a wobbly gesture in front of his middle.

“Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that sticks with you for years,” she says.

“You never said--”Jake mumbles, astonished. He had no clue that Cougar didn’t eat buffalo wings, no clue at all. Or that Cougar will eat chicken liver coated in pepper and fried smoking hot in Jennifer’s littlest fry pan. No clue that Jennifer would eat it too, if Cougar was dishing it out for her. Cougar hands over a fork with a cooled bit for Jake. It is melting smooth inside the coating, not like anything he expected. His surprise shows, too.

Cougar looks at Jake and says, “After I lost my first team, in-- in the mountains-- I couldn’t cut up chicken, or fry liver, or grill steaks. No raw bits. Any roast, it had to be cooked brown.”

Jake eventually shuts his mouth. “How long-- before you were okay with--”

“Six years,” Cougar says. Again he shrugs. “It comes and goes.”

Jennifer nods, like that’s about what she expected. It doesn’t shake her at all, probably from her background as a teacher. Whatever horror stories she’s heard, rumor has it that some of them have been real nightmares.

Jake hears his own mouth going. “Does it bother you when you’re-- when you’re trying to fix people up, do your medic thing?”

Jennifer whips her head around, mouth open, and Cougar just puts out his hand, fingers spread, and it stops her. Then he pats her forearm lightly, and smiles, and starts washing the skillet in the sink. Like it’s nothing, he says to the pan, “Not then. After, sometimes. You talked me through it last time.” Cougar slants up a look at Jake, his mouth quirks. “You didn’t know it, maybe.”

Jennifer takes the pan she’s handed. “Sounds like Jake.”

Cougar gives Jennifer a little smile, and tilts his head in Jake’s direction, and gives this indescribable little shrug that could mean a lot of things. _Get a load of this guy._ Exasperated affection, even.

Jennifer snorts, flaps her hands wide, and shakes her head, Then she starts buttering condiments onto bread. Cougar’s talking, but she’s _stopped_ talking and adopted Cougar-nonverbal instead.

Jake just stares at them. At a gesture, silently, he hands Cougar the designated glass of iced tea, and listens to the man talk to his sister with more words than he’s used in the past month with the Losers. It’s not just that Jennifer has a gift for this; it seems to be something about doing things in here, talking about cooking.

It’s something about Cougar’s face all bare nekkid without his hat, too. Things happen in his face you just don’t catch under the hat, which is certainly why he wears it all the time. Little flickers of amusement come and go all the time.

Just as Jake had kind of suspected, Cougar thinks everything is funny. Fights with Pooch over burnt-oven cleanup after Jake’s kitchen disasters? Hysterical. Bar brawls that got all the Losers in the brig? A nice break in the tedium on-base. Roque’s swearing when everybody else got busted for a prank planned out by Jake? That made Cougar chuckle, tattling on Jake to his sister, with sly side-glances, checking how Jake is taking this.

Until Jake leaps up and tried to clap a hand over Cougar’s mouth to stop him, and Cougar just rolls with it and takes them both leaping out the back door with a bang of the screen and stumbling down the steps and rolling into the long grass, over and over, while Cougar laughs at him in sharp little yips, exactly like his nickname.

Jake ends up on his back, arms pinned, with the smaller man’s legs locked around his to the point neither one can move. Jake is freshly reminded that the man can probably crack coconuts with his thighs. Cougar looks down at him, shoulders shaking, with those soft little yipping sounds barely audible, and he lets go of Jake’s wrists and pats him on the chest and disentangles himself as fast as he’d locked it up. Then he stands up and stretches, languidly, until his pants hang down and his belly shows, which is pure sass and attitude, as if Jake couldn’t possibly lunge up and nail his ass fast enough. Which of course is true, but Jake does grab enough of him to yank him down into the grass again.

Jake gets rolled around and pinned on his face this time, with Cougar’s knee in his back instead.

Cougar leans close, hair brushing Jake’s ear.

“Tap out?” Cougar says while Jake grunts in pain under his grip.

“God, you’re such a _stubborn_ lil cuss--” A giant heave accomplishes nothing. Cougar rides him like a bronco, which is _not_ an image that Jake really wanted stuck in his brain just then--

“Corned beef,” Cougar says then, chuckling, and lets him go anyway.

“Wash your hands, boys,” Jennifer says from the doorway, arms folded.

“Yes, Ma,” Jake says, which gets him a smack on the shoulder from Cougar.

“Be nice,” Cougar says.

“But she’s my _sister--”_

Cougar gives him the squinty look. “Yeee-ess? Sandwiches.”

Jake makes a raspberry noise back at him. “Truce.”

Cougar snorts. “Cease fire.”

“Okay, okay. For sandwiches.”

Cougar whacks his arm again, and then he frowns down at Jake’s legs. He starts smacking weed seeds off Jake’s shirt, his legs, off Jake’s ass. Jake completely fails to object to this abuse. “Hold still. Foxtails are of the devil.”

“You got that right,” Jake says. He starts whacking back, which just outlines for him very clearly what’s lurking under Cougar’s pants. Oh man, Dat Ass! “Turn again. Okay, you’re good.”

Cougar nods at the long weedy grasses drying against the house. “There’s mice. Are there snakes?”

Jake looks up. “Sometimes. You thinking about mowing the place?”

Cougar grunts. “And some repairs, maybe. Not as good as Pooch on fiddly things like doorknobs, but I know some.”

“First fix the mower.”

“Saw a shop on that main street, when we get groceries,” Cougar says. “Sharpen the blades and clean it and put in a new sparkplug.”

Jake blinks at him.

Cougar smacks him on the arm again. “You and I, we have _money_ for this kind of thing now.”

Jake scratches his head. “Yeah. You’re right. We do, by golly. We do.”

Cougar gives that smirk. “You remembered for the presents.”

Jake narrows his eyes. “You are evil, you are so eeeevol--”

Jennifer smiles, following them back into the house. To Cougar, she says, “And you _know_ you gotta keep my brother busy, right?”

Cougar smiles back at her. “Sí. Not just boring PT as usual. Also, he must be helping us by looking up the parts, the methods, doing the online homework at night.”

She shakes her head in admiration. “He never used to sleep much before, on leave.”

Cougar looks at her a moment. “Neither do I. We will keep quiet.” Then he makes a face. “As much as we can. I guess you know that-- “ and he just stops talking, making a irritable gesture with one hand. Then he folds his arms.

Both of them stand there looking at Cougar.

“Right,” Jake says, picking it up. “Some of the bad nights, we might-- hell, we might sack out down in the woods by the river, if it’s really bad, so we won’t wake up Beth or anything.”

“That’ll worry her more. She’s used to me waking up yelling. We just… put on some Laverne and Shirley, My Little Pony vids, those old Sailor Moon vids you sent us, right? Until we can fall over again. Beth will be okay if she knows you’re coming out of it. Just… give her the rules to handle it. Like, no banging open the door until you’ve stopped yelling, so you don’t shoot her accidentally.”

Cougar stares at Jake. “Was it that bad?”

Jake nods. “Back-- well, before-- yeah, before I met you guys. It’s got a lot better since I’ve got the team. Since I got you at my back.”

Cougar reaches up and grips his shoulder, releases him. “Yes.” Then he goes off to the bathroom, head down.

“He might be done talking for the day, I dunno,” Jake says. He doesn’t try to be quiet about it. No point. Cougar has ears like the proverbial, anyway.

“That’s okay, Beth’s due home in about an hour, and she’ll want to talk enough for six of us. She was too excited to sleep last night, she’ll probably be bouncing off the walls and crash really hard when she finally goes down.”

“Yay sugar crash,” Jake says, rubbing his hands and making an evol genius chuckle. He straightens up. “Hey Cougs, you got the presents? You know where I unpacked--”

Cougar thumps the closed bathroom door. That means yes, he knows, _yes._

Jennifer folds her arms, shakes her head. “You spent way too much, huh?”

“Hey, Cougs got it organized, we stayed way under budget, don’t worry. I got some sweet deals online, it all worked out.”

Jennifer hoists up an eyebrow at him.

“Nothing too big, the Man in the Hat wouldn’t allow anything too stupid, just little silly things.”

“I’m beginning to _really_ want to keep Cougar--” Jennifer pauses.

“--and hug him and feed him and call him George too?”

“No, he’s not a George. I think he’s more like, oh, Tiger, or Simba, or Sylvester or-- Nyancat.”

Jake groans.

Jennifer grins at him. “Okay, let’s get real, I’m really wanting Cougar to stay around to keep _you_ in line, Mister Tigger, how’s that?”

The man himself emerges briefly, drying off his face on a towel, with his hair all ruffled and damp at the tips. That is distracting. Especially with the flushed look on his face. It’s really not a look that Jake is accustomed to on the Man in the Hat with the long guns.

Jake tries to blink away another of those involuntary movie sequences where of course the man has just got back from a fantasy wardrobe trip in his Super Sekrit Superhero Identity. Cougs had to change, right, returning in time-traveler’s haste from waving a sword and flourishing lace cuffs and declaiming Castilian poetry or dancing with gypsies or beating up African leopards to save baby giraffes, or something. While riding Arabian horses. With tassles. And of course there he is on his amazing stolen gray stallion, flying falcons with jesses. There might be a meeting with solemn old sheikhs in white sipping coffee in big tents on enormous rugs, eating dates and talking about how to negotiate with those blue-masked Tuareg devils who raid the caravans… and yeah, you know Cougar would make a really lethal spy in his other Sekrit persona as dancing boy, with the little smirk and big gold cuffs and flying draperies and the scimitar that he can balance on ridiculous parts of his body while the rest of him keeps moving…

It takes some effort to make _that_ one go away. When he surfaces, both of them are looking at Jake. Waiting. Whatever he was saying during all that, it must not have been too outrageous. Jennifer is not _hitting_ him, anyway. “What?”

“Tuareg?” Cougar says. His accent makes it sound entirely different. Not so much with the pillows and perfumes and silks tumbled about. More of an edge to it.

Jake had forgot how Cougar has encountered actual live Tuareg. Possibly too many of them all at once, pissed off. He knows Cougar has dealt with various nomadic tribes around the world. Sometimes it was even in a nice way, where he learned things from them, like how to rig the local oxcart harnesses, or the timing on how you hunt local game. He knows the damndest things about finding grubs for fishing, for example.

Other times? More like sneaking up to grab the guide ropes around a warlord’s camp in a dust storm, trying to find all the skinny caravan guards picketed on ancient trucks. Things like using wire garrotes backed up by blackened KA-BAR blades in the middle of sandstorms. Let go of the guide rope in the middle of a fight, and you’re risking getting lost, never being found again or worse, getting found a month later as a mummy dehydrated out there on the erg.

This kind of stunt got pulled by the Losers against all good advice, too. Done in spite of the tribes being able to track sign invisible to most Western eyes. That’s once the storm has cleared, which can take days. Roque said once over a card game that the old nomadic guys can track you forever, once the young guys in the city have picked a fight. Cougar just grunted and said the old guys could track you through the city and a hundred miles beyond.

Yeah, fantasy has a tendency to pop like a giant soap bubble when Cougar says anything.

“Nothing, just-- presents, right? We were talking about presents.”

Jennifer rolls her eyes, smiles at Cougar.

He points at Jake. “No presents until mi amiga Beth is home, right?”

Jake makes a pouty face. “But I just-- I could just give Jen one of her little ones--”

“No,” Cougar says, and he’s ducked away again, echoing in the bathroom.

Jennifer looks at Jake and starts to chuckle. “He’s got your number, all right.”

“He ought to, as much time as he’s clocked listening to me jabber over my laptops, no brain-filters, totally hanging out all ten toes off the board, mindlessly blathering without brakes--”

Cougar returns with damp sleeves pushed up and little wet ringlets around his ears. “Your turn.”

“You’re so mean,” Jake says.

Cougar just taps his shoulder where the sergeant's stripes would sit on his uniform blouse. Then he taps his thumb on Jake’s chest. “Sandwiches.”

“Focus,” Jennifer agrees.

“Bunch of blue meanies,” Jake mumbles, heading for the bathroom to wash the dust off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Soccer Fans Unite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Probably not a great time for the Losers to let Jake start humming that song about the Law winning. How did it go?  
> "...but I did not shoot the deputy..."

The noise starts off somewhere possibly in the low radio frequencies and modulates rapidly upward to UHF. “EEeeeeeeeeeeeeeee---”

“Why yes,” Jake says mildly, “my niece, she can shatter drinking glasses and deafen Nile crocodiles and drive off marauding dire wolves. One of her super powers, you know.”

“I could tell,” Cougar says.

“Really,” Jake says, moving his feet and disposing himself in a braced position in his chair.

It doesn’t help.

The small blonde-haired missile rackets through the front door, hammers down the hall, and skates expertly sideways on the floor into the kitchen. “Uuuuuuuncle Jaaaaaaaaaaa--”

Boom.

Jake is lying on his back, arms full of squirming soccer girl, feet flung up in the air, with the chair broken under his weight. Soccer girl is still shrieking.

Cougar is standing over them, looking down, and the bastard is smiling. Smiling.

Then the sniper glances around at Jennifer, who’s shaking her head.

“Maybe we’ll buy a used truck,” Cougar says, a bass note under the siren of Jake’s niece, and he leans against the sink next to Jennifer. They fold their arms while the racket carries on.

Jake is too busy tickling--and being tickled, which he cannot resist, and squealing in a register at least as high as Beth uses--and rolling around on the floor to follow all of his sister’s comments.

“--a little hard on the furniture, as you can see,” she says.

“Sí, some new chairs. Couch?”

“Oh, we got maybe another couple months on that, if I don’t have another soccer team birthday party here.” She crosses her fingers and raps a wooden cabinet door.

“And if Roque and Clay don’t get drunk off their collective--” Jensen grunts.

“Why would _they--?”_ Cougar says, unfolding his arms. “No, they didn’t-- _Digame!”_

“Oh, they did. I was gonna tell you both earlier, but I got distracted.”

Cougar turns a disbelieving look on Jennifer when she picks it up.

“Oh, yeah, Jolene emailed me that the guys were heading up here pretty quick. I guess Jolene’s mama and grandmama were starting to measure them for wedding tuxes, some of the local gals took a liking to Roque--”

 _“¿Que?”_ Cougar says, like he’s shocked.

“Gotta admit nobody’s gonna mess with _his_ woman, and he’s still got all his teeth.” Jennifer starts to laugh. “Hey, you can’t be picky if you’re living in a small town.”

“Uncle Jaaaaake!” Beth says, hugging him.

Jensen sits up, propping himself and Beth against the wall. He starts humming the theme song for My Little Pony along with her. He rubs noses with Beth, who giggles. “So what did you pick out to watch tonight, hmm, Goalie-killer?”

“Madrid and Manchester, last month--” Beth says.

Cougar grunts, tipping his head back, and smiles at Jennifer.

“That was a complete _travesty!”_ Jake yelps. He goes on for a bit about the goaltending, the fouling ignored, the refereeing, and Beth argues the opposite case, gesturing to explain why technically they had to rule exactly the way that they did.

“Beth, now, behave. You just said that to wind him up,” Jennifer says.

Cougar’s mouth is curling upward.

“Was there money involved?” Jennifer asks the sniper.

“Sí,” Cougar says. He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Madrid, ehhhh. They break your heart, but who else could deserve it?”

“Oh, low blow!” Jake exclaims.

Beth shrieks in delight, waving her arms, gets up and stamps her feet like she’s in the bleachers of a stadium, and starts chanting in Spanish.

Cougar bestows one of his lordly feline smiles upon her. “A lady of taste and discernment.”

Jake staggers up onto his feet, clutches his chest. “Am I all alone in my--”

“Yes, you are, and you’re all dirty again. Go outside or go wash. Both of you.” Jennifer nods at Cougar. “Before you do, Beth, please say hello to our guest.”

“Buenas tardes, Tío Puma, ” Beth says, holding out her hand.

Cougar smiles again, takes her dirty sticky hand, sweeps out a bow, and kisses the air over it. Then he gives a murmur of Spanish, something about being overwhelmed by having a niece of such good taste in soccer play.

Beth giggles, waves her arms upward, and when Cougar spreads his hands wide, she hugs his leg fiercely. She leaves gummy marks on his pants leg. “Thank you, Tío Puma.”

“¿Por que, amiga?” Cougar asks, putting one hand on her back slowly, holding the other wide, as if to indicate that he’s not going to grab her the way that Jake did.

“For bringing Uncle Jake home all safe,” Beth says.

“Aahh. He brought me home safe too. ¿Es bueno, sí?”

“Sí,” Beth says. She lets go of him and bounces back, runs to the back door. “Tío, Tío, come see my chickens-- mis pollos-- Uncle Jaaaake, you have to bring your camera for the chickens--”

“Sure, give me a minute to pick up the mess, I’ll grab my camera,” Jake says. He starts picking up bits of broken chair to haul them to the trash. Cougar takes the parts, nods for him to go get the camera instead.

“There are chickens now?” Cougar is saying when Jake returns.

“Since the last video we sent,” Jennifer says. She grabs a big scuffed butter tub from near the sink. “Here, give them the kitchen scraps, Beth.”

“They like scraps,” Beth assures them both, leading them outside to the trash cans and then to the coop sitting in a wobbly fence enclosure. “We hatched them out from eggs under a light bulb, we lost two, Mom says we have coyotes, and we need to fix the fence.”

Jake looks over at Cougar, who nods. “Show us the chickens first. I gotta send that to the guys. Did your mom build the coop?”

Beth skips to the gate. “Yes! And I helped!” She’s just reaching for the latch when Cougar slams one arm into Jake’s ribs and he gathers up Beth in the other, and has crushed them both on the ground on their faces behind a scraggly bush.

“Sss,” Cougar says, with his body snaked over Beth’s in an odd posture, tilting his head around to one side of the thick trunk of the bush.

Jake can’t mistake the flat echo of a shot for anything else. Then another one. It’s not across the valley, either, it’s within a half mile, maybe closer. He opens his mouth, sees Beth with her mouth open too, and he cups one hand over it, silently. Then he mouths words silently at Cougar. _What are they shooting?_

Cougar waves a negative sign. He points at Jake, at Beth, and then at the house, two fierce jabs at the house. Then he rolls away from Beth, pushes her into the shelter of Jake’s body instead. In another breath he’s gone, crawling away on his elbows like a lizard.

Jake rolls on his side, lays a warning shush-finger over his own mouth and again over Beth’s mouth, and waits solemnly. She nods. Then he points out a pathway that runs behind the trashcans over to the hedge, behind bushes, and up to the front door. Beth nods again. Jake has her crawl first, so he can follow tightly enough to cover her body from most of the possible lines of sight. It won’t stop some kinds of rifle calibers, which could blow through both of them and right through all the house walls, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s only when he’s looking up from the living room floor, glaring up at his sister’s shocked face, hissing at her to get down _right the fuck now,_ that he realizes how strange it is that he’s snapped back into in-country mode so instantly. Jennifer looks down at him. When the phone in her pocket rings, she kind of jerks in place, sinks down onto the couch, and finally slides onto her knees. She pulls out the phone, looks at the number, frowns. Then she sits down on the floor, and starts tapping out a text message.

Much as he’d like to keep on hugging Beth with both arms, assuring himself that she’s okay, a little frightened but not terrified out of her wits, he knows better. He urges Beth to settle next to her mother while he heads back to the front door to listen. He lays on the floor there just inside the screen door, while he rechecks his own phone.

It’s got a single text message on it, identified as Clint Barton’s phone number. Yeah, like he’d have that private number installed on his phone, ever. JARVIS must have upgraded their call libraries automatically.

_I told Cougar we’re cleaning up the neighborhood. Roque lost his temper at the meth ranch about four houses down._

Jake sighs, and taps out his answer. _He does that. Need help?_

Then the phone vibrates in his grip. It’s Tony Stark’s number.

_tell Cougar not to shoot us_

Jake rolls his eyes. _Will do. If he checks his phone._

Another text message. Steve, this time:

_TEwll ROKe ples NOt SHUoOtt nyBodY ELS_

Okay, by now Jake’s eyebrows are crawling up high enough to fall off the back of his head. He answers, _I can try._

Again it vibrates, showing Pooch’s alternate phone number.

_Tell Barton not to shoot us._

Jake peers out the doorway. What the hell, is it the OK Corral down there? He finally gives up and texts Pooch that selfsame question.

Meanwhile, Jennifer starts to chuckle. She flops down on the floor, flat on her back, and starts laughing, holding onto Beth. When Jake peers around at her, she holds out her phone.

The text messages show an exchange between her and Roque.

_u no u got meth lab 3 km fm ur coop_

_No, I did not._

_now u dont_

_Thanks_

_ur wlcm warn jj defuse crzy snipr_

_How bad is it?_

_cgs mad no FYI_

_I bet! What happened?_

_ironman help cpt america raid, us losers bkp as per specs_

_With no FYI to JJ and Cougs?_

_whut he said so six druggies + local sheriff piss pants just sad scene_

_So when do you guys want dinner? PS, send Cougar to store, JJ will meet. Urgent need for barbecue skillz timely._

_ur da best cgs mebbe free 2 hrs must give rpt on takedown 3 guys_

“Jeez,” Jake says. His phone vibrates.

Barton’s number again.

_Tell Cougar not to shoot the sheriff. It always ends badly._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Barbecue at Jennifer's House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> None of these guys can just sit and eat and drink, they always gotta be planning stuff. Also, Cougar just gets peopled-out. And he was doing so well, too.
> 
>  
> 
> See also slashersivi's complement for this story, this chapter, here:  
> [Scared Cats and Brave Dogs](http://archiveofourown.org/works/999663)  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for rude language and swear words. These guys all have potty-mouths, just sayin'.

 

 

“So there I was in the garage--” Pooch was saying, waving around a messy chicken leg.

Roque’s newly-rescued puppy is sitting adoringly at their feet, head moving to follow the chicken leg. The pup has enormous feet, eyes in different colors, and a strangely lumpy massive head at least the size of some ugly Mastiff-Canario cross. She wouldn’t be cute in the least except that, in the space of three hours, she has become utter and complete goo in the hands of Roque and Beth. They taught her to sit in half an hour. They’d given her a flea bath in the back yard and checked her teeth, on camera, to upload for JARVIS to consult veterinary records, for crying out loud. Finally they collectively declared her just over a year old. Mistress Beth is on her third set of clean clothes, and at the rate she’s collecting barbecue sauce spatters, she might need another bath before bedtime.

Jake is sitting on the back steps watching Pooch and Jolene and their baby and Jennifer and Clay and Barton talking at the groaning picnic table, while Steve and Roque are sitting on old cut logs on the grass nearby, explaining to Beth how Roque should be exercising the animal to overcome many months of neglect. Beth’s previous rescue puppy had earned a slot in training as a handicapped assistance dog, which was helpful to the soccer-laden household both time- and budgetwise, but Beth still misses him, and this reminder is clearly going to bring on the longing for more dog.

Tony is bouncing around taking pictures, Coulson is standing out by the hedge muttering something on his cell phone about Henry Kissinger’s latest bloviating, and Natasha is roving around the place checking their perimeter. Hey, it makes her happy, and the rest of them can relax.

Everybody has eaten to groaning point, including the dog. Apparently the idiot guards on the meth lab ranch down the way spent zero time on the big awkward beast, the ranch owner thought such animals were something you chained up like installing a cheap off-the-shelf security system, and the poor thing had been lucky if it got fed once a day.

Jennifer has no reason whatever to trust the animal near her daughter, except that the adoration in the mismatched eyes when Beth drags her around with a piece of cord for a leash is... very convincing. Sort of like watching Beth hijack Roque himself, really. Better chance of civil behavior from the dog than the man, and everybody knows it, including Beth herself.

Jake is a little worried by this. Nobody taught Beth how to do that. She just… knows how to do things like that. She’s even got Cougar acting odd.

Between Cougar and Beth it’s unclear who is running the show, but they’re both doing things atypical of either one alone, and thick as thieves. Definitely in a Sekret Cabal to Drive Jake Totally Nuts.

Cougar puts down a long fork on the log stump near the barbecue kettle, closes the kettle lid, wipes his hands off on a paper towel, and folds himself up to perch on the step next to Jake. He smells of smoke and sauce and burnt sugar and sweat and leather and just a bit of gun powder and oil.

“Nom nom nom,” Jake says, leaning in.

The hat brim tilts up. There’s the smile quirking at him. “More?”

“Oh Gawd no, I couldn’t. Man, when you cook a side of cow, you don’t fool around.”

Cougar shrugs. “Also pig.”

“And chicken, man!  And andoille sausage, and--”

“No more sausage,” Cougar says, lifting the warn-finger at him. “Saving that for Jolene’s gumbo.”

“Huh. Okay. I hear rave reviews, I’ll take it on faith until the great day. So, like, how are you ever gonna get the smoke out of those clothes so that Moose and Squirrel won’t smell the mighty hunter coming?”

“New clothes,” Cougar says.

“And the hat?”

He shrugs. “Peking Opera wardrobe sprays high proof wines, very fine mist, on their performance robes to clean them.”

“Oh hey, like a medieval dry cleaner! You’re a trivia guy just like me, admit it!”

Cougar grunts, propping his elbows up on his knees, hands dangling to keep them clean. His pants still bear the imprint of sticky spots from Beth’s hands, dust-covered now.

“You still pissed that they didn’t give us a heads-up on their little meth bust?”

Cougar squints over at Coulson, shrugs. “Short notice.”

“What? C’mon, what’s bugging you?”

Cougar shrugs again. The hat brim tips away. Jake holds still, watching the hands. The hands absolutely do not move, do not fret around, do not fidget like his own would. Cougar’s hands are trained out of any tells like that. They’re completely relaxed, nothing to see here, move along.

Except when Jake reaches out to grab, Cougar’s other arm snaps up like a snake and his fingers press in on a pressure point in the base of Jake’s thumb, and just as quickly let go again, _bam!_

“Ohhhkay then,” Jake says, grimacing. It stings like hell, but it’ll fade soon, and leave no long-term damage. Cougar hasn’t used long-term damaging pain points on Jake, ever. But he certainly knows where they are. “You gonna teach Beth all that stuff?”

“God willing,” Cougar says. His voice sounds like it’s coming from a long, long way away.

Jake looks at him. “Hey Cougs, you know, I was really glad you were there. I was. If we had a stray shot incoming from whatever crap they were stockpiling at the ranch, that woulda saved--”

Cougar lifts the hat brim and stares up at Jake. There are lines of muscle drawn hard in his face, shifting around like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t.

“Yeah, yeah, they prolly had shit there with a range of a half mile or something, right? Stupid. I mean, they prolly couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a fucking shotgun, but they buy crazy sharpshooter shit along with the room-brooms and plastic guns you wouldn’t even bother with, am I right?”

Cougar’s mouth does something strange, flattening out very thin, and his eyes squint down, and Jake knows what he is looking at, and it isn’t something Jake wants to keep looking at. Stare down that velociraptor, riiiight. And this one is probably smarter than you about things like distances and hiding places and blood scents and...everything, really.

Jake keeps his gaze up anyway. Keeps talking. “I mean, if they were smart they wouldn’t have been peddling in volumes careless enough to get federal attention in the first place, am I right?”

The black eyes narrow down to slits.

Okay, so Cougar is still angry about that ranch down the road, or the people running the lab there, or how the raid went down, and he’s not ready to talk about it.

The thing is, the guy who doesn’t talk, who’s icy calm on a sniper gig, who puts his head down and keeps slogging when he’s in the field-- well, threaten his team, start shooting at his adopted people, and he’s a grenade with the pin out. He is _nuts._

Yeah, this is the predator who can use _anything_ in a bar fight, and has been known to bend rifle barrels into a knot over rafter beams. How the effing hell he does it-- well, okay, use a cleaning rod to get extra leverage maybe, and Jake needs to drop this obsessive line of reasoning before his mouth starts repeating it out loud, he knows this is a problem, he just can’t stop when he’s been awake for 30-some hours--

Also, don’t fucking blink, or Cougar will vanish like smoke. He may vanish for a couple of days if it’s really bad. Cougar doesn’t let his teammates see him in this kind of rage. He sure doesn’t want Jake’s sister or daughter or Pooch’s wife or any of the Avengers to see it happen to him.

He told Jake once that “it lacks dignity.”

Yeah, like insane berserkergang ninja sniper with a complete lack of fear is “a bit messy.”

Which all makes Jake’s trademark chattering, trying to randomly jump to better topics, distract the man from being homicidal, well, that’s going a little rockier than usual. Jake does his best, throwing in a hasty transition to talking about Beth’s favorite tv shows.

Cougar is not appeased. But the eyes are watching him again, not drowning in some horrible scenario in the back of Cougar’s fucked-up head, he’s come back to the real world a little more. That’s good. He’s still pissed, but he’s not zoning out. Progress, good, we’ll take it.

“So there’s all these toys and games based on the show--”

Jake sees Cougar’s eyes move away to track movement, but he doesn’t give in to the temptation himself.

“If they were smart, those ranch guys wouldn’t have been cooking meth old-style,” Tony Stark says to them, walking up and nodding. Thanks, turkey, for going back to the untouchable topic and ruining everything. Tony props one foot up against the side of the house, and holds out two cans of beer. Wads of foxtail seeds are stuck in the dark pants he put on after he got out of the armor. “It kind of explodes if you’re sloppy about your open cigarette flames, or your chemistry ratios. Here, guys. One for you, and one for you. Thank you, Sergeant Alvarez, for some of the best barbecue I have ever tasted in my life.”

“De nada,” Cougar says, accepting the can of beer.

“You guys look like you’re having a tough conversation, and I will make myself scarce if I’m interrupting--” Tony says.

Cougar slants up a look at Tony. Lifts the eyebrow at him.

Tony grins. “Okay, okay, I’m pushy, I’m from New Yawk, whaddya want?”

Cougar tilts the hat brim in Jake’s direction to indicate he’s used to pushy talkers, waves one hand aside like he’s wiping a chalkboard, and nods at Tony.

“Been wanting to ask you a question, off in private,” Tony says.

Cougar looks at Tony’s hands. At the silver bracelet on his right wrist. Certainly it’s not just a watch.

“Oh, yeah. You’re right. Not private from JARVIS, yeah. But hell, JARVIS loves you guys, trust me, you got _nothing_ to worry about there.”

Cougar rolls one palm up in some kind of consent, waiting.

Tony looks away. He’s always glancing around, keeping an eye on things as people move around him. He picks some of the foxtail stems, starts braiding them together. It’s like his hands won’t stay idle. He says, “So, how many times did General Ross try to hijack you from other operations to shoot Doctor Banner?”

Cougar snorts, pops open the top on the beer, and says, “Eight.”

“Jeeebus McNuggets on toasted sorry crackers!”

Cougar shrugs.

Jensen shakes his head, worried. “There were probably more that didn’t get down to Cougs. I know Clay had some fun things rolling down from on high that he just… left to compost on his desk, you know? Stuff he didn’t need to drag downward to us.”

“Yeah, lots of stuff is better left lying there. Let it age the stink off it for awhile,” Tony says.

Cougar gives a noise of agreement, exhaling.

“So, how come you dialed yourself out on Ross’s gangbangs?” Tony picks some more straw stems.

Cougar tilts the hat brim downward. He produces a sound between a typical Cougar-style _pffehhhh!_ of disgust and a thick, disgusting, phlemmy throat noise like he’s going to spit a big ol’ wad from a tobacco-chaw. _Gaaaaaakhhhh._

Tony blinks.

Jake starts to laugh, startled. He didn’t know Cougar could _make_ noises like that.

“You don’t just lean on other people’s intel, do you?”

Cougar sips beer. “Basic. No one source. Get to know the target.” Then he turns his head and looks at Jensen. He reaches out, pats Jake’s forearm. “Lean on _good_ intel sources.”

Jake is left stunned, mouth hung open just over his beer can.

“Have a drink,” Cougar says kindly, and pats him again. Then he looks at Tony. “Best intel says no, the Losers do not shoot doctors who--” he makes a quote sign with his fingers above the beer can, _“--‘treat kids with tuberculosis in India, and the Losers do not take orders from fraudsters and shit-weasels.’”_

Jensen exhales a wheeze of disbelief. Who needs to order up a spit-take when he hasn’t even had a chance to take a drink?

Tony’s staring too, with a slow smile coming up on his face. “Yeah? No kidding. Is that right?”

Cougar tips a glare at Tony. “No, we are _not_ good li’l sojers who just shut up and take orders. We don’t take _illegal_ orders. You really don’t want a sociopath with my range scores to take orders from _any_ goddamn asshole with a megalomania problem.” Then he flicks up the extra fingers on the beer can into a salute, and he takes another sip. “Good beer.”

Tony tips back his head and starts to laugh. “You’re welcome. Goes with the righteous barbecue.”

“Ross isn’t just an asshole, Cougs, he’s got--” Jake says, worried again.

“He’s an idiot. Ask Banner to do something for public health, anything, he’d be _on_ it. He’d work 24-7 for that, go in for tests, anything. But no, Ross fucks it all up. Bungling idiot.”

“Jake, I think your sister has done something to your sniper,” Tony says, grinning all across his face. “He’s talking.”

Cougar glares at them both. “You won’t like it.”

“How come?”

“Kim’s Game,” Cougar says.

“The memory game thing,” Steve says, coming around to lean on the wall next to Tony. “You remember what kind of cigarettes Ross smokes?”

Cougar lists four different brands.

“Shit, is it really--” Tony says.

“Ask JARVIS,” Cougar snaps.

Tony lifts his eyebrows.

Steve folds his arms, frowning. He’s looking at Cougar like the sniper might explode.

“You okay?” Jake asks.

Cougar scowls into the distance. “I am unfit for civilian… for civvie anything.”

“You could go run perimeter for awhile, send in Nat so she can get a snack,” Steve suggests mildly, looking away, picking foxtail seeds out of his jeans.

Cougar looks around at Steve fiercely.

Steve smiles at him. “That was really good cooking. Thank you.”

“De nada,” Cougar says. His jaw muscles clench and shift. It’s like he’s having trouble making words come out. “Yes, I will send in Natasha.” He looks at Jake. Reaches out, grips Jake’s forearm carefully, lets go. Then he’s off, dumping his empty can in the bin, and striding away toward the windbreak, with the hat pulled down. Jake is kind of touched and pleased that the sniper trusts the Avengers enough to walk away like this, leaving Jake and Beth and Jennifer in their hands.

Clay looks around at Jake, questioning.

So does Beth.

“He’s just having a tree-climbing moment,” Jake says to them.

Clay nods.

Roque snorts. “Boy’s been talking too much.”

“It does that to some,” Steve says, agreeing.

“My fault,” Tony says, scrubbing at his beard.

“No,” Jake says. “It’s everything, it’s just been a day, you know? People dropping glass jars in the grocery store, and the shots over there on the ranch, and dealing with yackety Jensens--”

“Oh, sure, we wouldn’t know anything about what that’s like,” Steve says mildly, and slants a smile at Tony.

Beth’s face clears, and she smiles, and looks down at the dog. “We’ll go visit him after awhile, right, won’t we, Sweetie Pie? Won’t we, Uncle Roque?”

“Sure. Call him out with ice cream, we got _his_ number all right,” Roque says. He scrubs his big hands along the dog’s jowls and she makes faces, leaning into it. “Just like you, huh?”

“Is that her name now? Sweetie Pie?” Steve asks, walking back to them. He scrubs the dog’s neck and shoulders, getting a huge wrinkly drooling grin from the dog. Dogs always adore Steve.

“We haven’t decided yet, me and Uncle Roque. She might be an Annabelle or a Maisy or a Pinkie Pie,” Beth says solemnly. “We don’t know how brave she is yet.”

“Oh, I think she’s pretty brave,” Jennifer says.

“And you gotta teach her _how_ to be brave on stuff that’s hard for dogs,” Roque says. “Gotta show her how she can do the right thing and come through for you, so she can trust you for next time you ask her to do something hard.”

“Big job sometimes,” Clay says.

“You got that right,” Roque says, scrubbing his hands down the dog’s ribs and along her chest and down her legs. “You see how she’s letting me get down to her feet, Beth? We’ll work on picking up her feet maybe tomorrow. Work on those grown-out nails, start getting her toes back into shape again. Yes, yes we will, Sweetie, we will get those paws all sorted out, get your stride back in shape in no time. You like that? Does that hurt, there’s an old scar there, is that okay? That’s good. Okay, gimme the other leg, that’s right.”

“I’m not used to hearing babytalk from Roque, either,” Jake says, and hears a smothered laugh from Tony.

Jake manages to clamp his mouth shut before he shares the next bit, raving about how Cougar vanishes silently into the hedge. It must be embarrassingly obvious to the entire known world, but when will he ever fail to get distracted watching the man stalk away? Dat Hat, and Dat Ass, and the scuffed old boots and the hands...man, those _hands..._ When, he asks himself in despair, will Cougar walking away ever stop being the hottest thing since the opening bang at the beginning of the universe?

He glances up, and sees Tony looking at the guys making mooshy silly noises at the dog. Tony flips aside the intricate straw star he just made, and picks seeds out of his pants legs. He nods at Jake. “The Sergeant’s probably right. We won’t like the way he remembers exactly what we said. That near-photographic memory thing. To be precise, he’s not quite totally a photographic brain, or I guess he’d be more of an idiot-savant, totally limited on coming up with creative options in the field. By all accounts, _unimaginative_ is not what anybody calls your crazy long-jumping buddy. Or the rest of youse louses, either.”

Jake sighs. “I don’t even _know_ all the stories.”

Tony grunts. “Neither do the rest of us. Okay, I bet Fury got’s a decent collection going, but they pay him for that. Okay, right-- oh, well, shit, Barton’s disappeared. I was hoping we could drag _him_ out of the trees and get him back in the quinjet in time for aperitifs at home around midnight or something. Never saw a guy who loves trees like that. Or roofs. Okay, maybe it’s a sniper thing for heights.”

Jake says, “Barton might’ve gone down there by the river to talk to Cougar.”

“So maybe your buddy is not handling smashed jars or barking dogs very well, huh?”

“Or gunshots down the road. I was hoping it would be better down here, out in the weather doing regular chores and stuff. I mean, normally _nothing_ happens.”

Tony snorts. “Steve wanted to roust every neighbor in ten miles just to check where they’ve got the drugs stashed.”

Jake peers up at Tony. “That’s not like him, is it?”

“Nope.” Tony nods toward Beth as she races around the seated grownups. “Suspect it’s something to do with your complete tyrant of a niece.”

“Huh. Right. Okay, so whose idea was it to look up Jennifer’s neighbors for probable cause stuff?”

Tony scrubs at the back of his neck. “Umm, there were these outstanding warrants popping up in the area, figured it wouldn’t hurt to check. Especially if you’re tying loveknots in Cougar’s hair and he’s gonna go all Machete on dumb assholes who threaten your sister’s place. Hell, I hear he makes Machete look like a car salesman. You know, there’s folks in uniform out there who have a real lust in their hearts for your friend’s skills.”

Jake fidgets. “Do I want to know?”

“Well, if Coulson doesn’t snatch him, ATF or somebody will want to enlist him. The Sergeant has a future in law enforcement anywhere he decides to settle down.”

“He’s a soldier, he _kills_ people for a living, he isn’t trained on civil codes and civilian restraints on the--”

“So what’s stopping you pulling up those resources for him? Give him time to start learning it? Has he said he wants to stay in the service? Does he hate the idea of being a cop?”

“Hell, no, he hasn’t said much of anything--” Jake blurts. He grabs himself into a hug. “Sorry, I just-- not really mine to say, you know?”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Coulson says your buddy would make a helluva policeman, you can’t rile him up no matter what.”

Jake snorts. “Except for special circumstances, like Beth.”

“Well, I kinda like him for that. The guy’s not actually a sociopath. He’s just very picky about who he tolerates, and more so about who he likes, long term. I totally get that about him.”

Jake frowns at Tony. “We are talking about the guy who can pick up triplets in tiny little Alaskan bars, or a whole troupe of women acrobats in Durbin, or--”

Tony waves it off. “No biggie, if the ladies decide in your favor. Hey, nothing to do with _you_ under the circumstances, it’s all on them. You’re just along for the ride, buddy.”

“Some ride!”

Tony shrugs. “Not if you’re just doing your best to be entertaining, it’s not your happy place. Just something to do when you’re bored.”

Jake stares at him. _“Bored?”_

“Yeah. I’m talking about where he _wants_ to spend his time. How much choice you got, come right down to it, when you guys are out on jobs all the time?”

Jake rests his chin in both fists, leaning forward. “You’re telling me that _you,_ clearly voted in as one of the smartest, richest guys in the world, _you_ get bored hanging out with beautiful women throwing themselves all over you. Lapdancing on you. Trying to--”

“--to pick my pocket pretty often, steal my tech, grab a piece off my pants to prove they did it to their girlfriends, yank some hair to take it to a lab for analysis for any number of things, steal phone video of me being stupid at a bad angle so they can share it with six million of their best friends online, sure. After you’ve had a Pepper in your life, you’ll never go back to stupid again. Besides, hanging out with Banner working on gamma radiation, or hell, with Pooch, working on bikes, is a helluva lot more fun, honestly. Pooch is a hoot, really. That guy gets it on the classics, and he’s a good hand with a wire brush or a welding torch. I mean, crap, I do like a person with decent skills. Which, pretty much, in your respective fields, sums up your team. So yeah, I can understand Cougar choosing downtime with his bros when he has some kind of choice about it.”

Jake nods, astonished in several different directions. “He’s not gonna just settle down for a shrill little mamacita with a picket fence and a poodle until some crack dealer blows him away. I mean, just not happening.”

“I’d just like to see you guys settled down somewhere out of harm’s way when Max finally goes down, and takes Ross and maybe half of DC with him on the way.”

“Is anywhere out of harm’s way? With that kind of shock wave?”

Tony gives a wry lift of an eyebrow. “Point.”

“If you think we’re a liability working on the Max situation, sure, you’d want us to book it into the back of beyond and keep our noses out of it. But if--”

Tony holds up empty hands. “JJ, listen, really, I got nothing against you guys working on bringing down Max. But I think you’re the main one with the relevant skills right now, and you can work in lots of places. All these guys on your team have been run ragged for a long time. They need downtime. They can keep an eye out while you’re working the intel, and they can sure bring it when the game calls for surveillance. But we _really_ don’t want you guys looking idle and ripe for picking at CENTCOM, right? On-call for Ross or any of his cabal to grab you? No. I’m saying, if you stay in-service you make hostages, not warriors, where our guys have to go in and rescue you. And believe me, Ross has a trail of debris behind him on horrible things that happened to sworn personnel. If you don’t believe me, talk to Coulson. Talk to Colonel Rhodes. Hell, talk to Fury. You won’t like it, but you can talk to him.”

Jake smiles crookedly. “I had that impression.”

“Just in case you’re wondering, I already had this conversation with Clay about a week ago. He said _you’re_ stubborn as a stretch of bad road and you’d have to be persuaded to use your coding chops with all of this clearly in mind. You do not tackle Max directly, you call in with whatever hot shit you find, right? You do not want Cougar sent off to the special hospital.”

Jake finds himself standing up, looming in over the guy. He hears the weird tone in his own voice, too. “Nobody’s sending him off _anywhere.”_

Tony grins up at him. “Good. So when are we having the retirement parties?”

Jake hears the crunch of dry grass, and turns.

Clay lifts a beer bottle in greeting. “Well, we have a promise of Jolene’s gumbo, day after tomorrow. I should hear by then. I sent in expedited papers after you and I talked last week. Coulson’s checking on a few things about serving the end of our enlistments with SHIELD under a secret clearance high enough to give Ross’s guys some grief.” He tilts his head in Jake’s direction. “You didn’t even read that stack I gave you to sign, did you?”

“Well, I read some of it, about GI benefits and stuff… going back to school, that type of stuff, I was talking with Steve about that.”

Clay snorts, and pats Jake on the shoulder.

“So did we--”Jake begins, confused.

Clay shakes his head. “Son, you’ve been buried in your computer searches so deep I don’t think you heard any of us talking about it. Jolene practically shoved the pen in Pooch’s fist. Roque is grumbling about losing out on the retirement paygrade he wanted, but I think he’ll make out okay. Cougar just…” he shook his head. “He said he’d keep an eye on you regardless, until Max is dealt with. I don’t think you could pry him loose with a jimmy bar.”

“There you have it,” Tony says. “Congratulations, soldier, you just got designated as the owner of Cougar’s picket fence and poodle. I hope it doesn’t ruin the carpets and bite people.” He reaches out his hand to Jake, who shakes it, bewildered.

“Poodle?” Jake says, puzzled.

Clay starts to laugh. “Roque would have a fit, not taking care of some poor mutt to his standards.”

“I can see that,” Tony agrees. “The man is scary about his dog care.”

“I can’t see Cougar walking a poodle, “ Jake says, grimacing.

“But we can see you with one, easy,” Clay says, grinning at Jake. “So what kind of retirement cake do you want, soldier?”

Jake rolls his eyes. “Like Cougar’s going for anything less than chocolate.”

Tony holds up his hands. “Trust me, I got this. Well, JARVIS has it. What else you want me to bring that goes with gumbo?”

“Beer and bourbon,” Clay says.

“You are clearly a man who has his priorities sorted,” Tony says.

“Damn right,” Clay says, saluting him with a beer can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	6. Why Jake Never Drinks, or, Almost Never

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Losers really have no mercy on drunks, even on themselves. But that's okay, because Jake expects no better. He has experienced some memorable deterrents by his older sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Onward with the usual potty-mouth swearing. Discussions of consent and lack of it. Jake's brain is capable of making connections that I'm not sure any of us are ready to think about. Also, implied alcoholic blackouts; while Jake is busy proving it, there's a strong suggestion that all the Losers make horrible drunks; and a reference to underage sex.
> 
> SiC = Second in Command

 

 

“Ouch,” Jake says, groping for his glasses, and not finding them in the shadows among the trees.

There’s a growl from somewhere overhead. “Stand still.”

“Okay.” Jake squints, but he still can’t see anything moving in the tangled patches of moonlight. “This is what I get for faking my eye chart results, isn’t it?”

“No, this is.”

“ _Ouch.”_

“That will never get old.”

“Pooch, you are _mean,”_ Barton’s voice says.

“Stand still!” Roque doesn’t sound any better growling from ground level.

“Shit, how many of you are there?” Jake sweeps his hands out, catches on a tree branch, clutches it. Lets go hastily when he realizes that crawling sensation is from some massive trail of _ants_ on that branch, not just his arm going weird on him.

“More than you think,” Clay chuckles.

“It was the yelling, man, you know we hate that shit when you start yelling,” Pooch says.

Tony’s voice says, “How many beers did you have, anyway?”

“Umm,” Jake says.

“Enough to get paralytic, clearly,” Barton says.

“With your niece asleep right there in the house?” Roque rumbles ominously.

“Well, hey, I’d never normally, but you know, with this much company to keep an eye out--” Jake sputters to a stop, embarrassed. He doesn’t remember asking any of the guys to play designated picket tonight. You’re supposed to ask first, not assume.

“You mean you expected Cougar to watch the place for you,” Roque growls.

“Like you could stop him doing that anyway,” Pooch says.

“Well, when did you see him last?” Roque snaps.

“Couple hours,” Pooch says.

“Yeah,” Barton agrees.

“Did he take one of the trucks?”

“No,” Barton says.

“Did you see him leave the tree cover?” Why yes, this is why Roque is their fucking damn SiC, and the rest of them do what he tells them. Mostly. When they can.

“No,” Barton says.

All of this byplay finally starts to click together. “Where is Cougs?” Jake says, and hates the little quaver in his voice. He’s smacking clumsily at his arm, trying to brush off the ants off his wrist, the nasty little fuckers, some of which are biting him, dammit.

“God knows,” Pooch says.

Barton sighs, like, _right behind_ Jake, and grabs his other arm. “Here you go, glasses.”

“Thanks, man,” Jake says, and fumbles with them. Drops them again.

“Your turn,” Barton says, like he’s disgusted, and a shadow moves, and then he’s gone, with no sound of branches or grass crunching or anything.

“Oh, okay,” Roque says, and smacks somebody who’s wearing leather.

“Right, you’re up,” Pooch says, and then there’s the noise of several men walking away without trying to be quiet.

“Cougar?” Jake says.

There’s no sound at all. Just something touches Jake’s chest, and an angular shape slides into his shirt pocket. Then something hot and dry touches his hand, and a leathery palm is brushing off Jake’s ant-pestered arm, and pats the back of his wrist .

“Cougs,” Jake says, smacking at his shirt pocket, finding the glasses safely tucked in, folded up. He leaves them there. Better safe than sorry.

“Are you going to vomit?” Cougar says.

Jake starts to laugh. Shaky, but laughing. “No, I’m okay. You’re here, I’m okay.”

Cougar sighs.

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard me say that before, huh?”

“Usually it’s Clay or Roque, not you,” Cougar says.

Jake stumbles toward his voice, staggering over the uneven ground. “Where are you?”

“Here,” Cougar says.

Jake gropes out with one hand, but nothing meets his waving fingers. “Where?  C’mon, I can’t see--”

“Don’t step in the gopher hole,” Cougar says.

“Uhh,” Jake says, wobbling on one foot.

A hand grips his shoulder, pulls on him slightly at an angle, and he staggers in that direction instead, puts his boot down on a pile of sandy soil. Gopher diggings for sure.

“Can you steer me? Please?”

“You’re not going to grab me?” Cougar says.

“ _What?”_

“You get hammered, you grab, and you never remember doing it.”

Jake stands locked in place, astonished.

“You never remember,” Cougar says, in a very weird tone of voice.

“Um, when I grab you, am I-- am I-- doing stuff? Uhhh, like, hitting you? Am I trying to hurt you or anything?”

There’s a long pause, where Jake wonders if the sniper has just walked away.

“No,” Cougar says finally. “I know you have bad dreams, you hit out at people who hurt you.”

“Oh _Christ._ When did _that_ happen?”

“Lots of times,” Cougar says.

“Oh God, just kill me now,” Jake groans, and it’s just easier to fold up onto his knees and squelch down into the loose gopher diggings. Put his hands down in the sand and hang on better. When he finally lifts his head, though, he’s at an angle where he can see the sniper’s boots are right in front of him.

Cougar hasn’t left. He’s standing right there. Of course he picked a shadow instead of standing in moonlight, but he’s close there. The angle of his legs say that he’s standing with his arms folded. The man does that when he gets cold, like he’s got no insulation left. Hasn’t been eating enough lately to keep the meat on his skinny bones. Probably feeling really cold out here, even in his leather vest, although it’s not that bad yet. He’ll wait out here all night if he gets that notion stuck in his head, he’s stubborn like that. He might not let Jake get a decent grip on him, but he’s really close.

“You should leave me here. Go in and get some of Jen’s coffee, get warmed up.”

“And leave you out here crying on a gopher mound.”

“Yes,” Jake says.

Cougar says something in Spanish that involves Jake’s nickname, _“Arrendajo,”_ which Beth gave him earlier today, saying that it means jay, as in the bird, blue jay. It starts off nicely with that and then it definitely ends in the word, _mierda._ Shit.

“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” Jake says, and he can hear how badly he’s enunciating. “But you should go in and get some nice hot coffee. You could drink some coffee for me, and let me lay out here blubbering like a baby and just saying stupid shit and feeling sorry for myself and just--”

“ _¿Por qué iba a parar?_ ” Cougar says.

“Sorry?” Jake says.

Cougar sighs. “I doubt that. I do not think you are sorry.”

“Oh, I am. I really truly am. Every time I get this hammered, I am sorry for days.”

“What do I tell your sister, when I leave you crying out here on a gopher mound?”

Jake wallows up onto one knee instead of two. “You wouldn’t--”

“Oh, I must. She will ask me.”

“Dude, you are _cruel._ You are laughing at me,” Jake says.

“Oh, no, I am not. I am imagining if _I_ was smashed out of my mind out here, and _you_ had to face _mis padres_ in the house. Believe me, they would call for the special hospital for me. Now _that_ is funny shit.”

“Cougs, no-- no, that’s all kinds of wrong, no, I would never let them do that to you--”

“Uh huh,” Cougar says flatly.

He wallows in the loose dirt. Finally, somehow, Jake is up on his feet, hands out, staggering toward Cougar. He’s really expecting Cougar to dance away, to stay out of reach, so it’s a shock when he doesn’t move. There he is, solid as all hell under Jake’s wobbly touch. “Dude, no, we’d never do that, I wouldn’t let them--”

“Right, you’ll stop that happening, when you’re drunk as shit,” Cougar says.

“Cougs--” Jake has his dirtied hands on the man’s shoulders, okay, he’s leaning a little too hard. He lets off on the grip, gets his balance, pats off Cougar’s vest carefully. “If you need me to keep an eye out from here on, then I will, I promise. No getting hammered, nada, zip. I swear. I do. You know I’m good for it.”

“If you remember,” Cougar says.

“Yeah,” Jake says, and he can hear himself wheezing, how he’s breathing too fast. “Okay, you’re upset. You’re mad at me. I do bad shit when I’m hammered, and you don’t like it, and I get it, you don’t want me to touch you--”

“Not when you’re drunk,” Cougar says.

“Okay,” Jake says. He’d nod his head, but that would be a bad idea. “Okay.”

Cougar puts up a hand and touches Jake’s face, pushes hair out of Jake’s eyes. “Because you’re too far gone to give consent,” he says.

Jake blinks stupidly at the darkness where the voice comes from. “What?”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“We have?”

“Yes. You explained to me when you get drunk you have a problem with short term memory tracking over to long term,” Cougar says.

“If I do bad shit, how come you didn’t warn me not to drink--”

Cougar puts his hand down on Jake’s wrist, holds him still. “Warnings don’t work on guys who want to drink.”

“Cougs, what--”

“Ask me later, after the hangover. We can talk then, if you remember when you wake up.”

“But if I never remember--”

“Not now. Not when you’re my friend who’s way too hammered for consent.” The leathery hand lets go of his wrist.

Jake squints at the darkness. “Wait-- wait, what--”

“Are you coming in the house with me, so I do not say silly things to your sister?”

“Yeah, okay, if you want--you’ll have to steer me around, how do you want me to--”

“Hold onto the belt,” Cougar says, and puts a buckle on Jake’s fingers. “You’ll walk better if you’re on your own balance, not leaning over into me.”

“Okay,” Jake says. “Wait, wait--you keep saying I can’t give consent if I’m drunk off my ass, what do I need to give consent _for?”_

Cougar sighs. “Later. Walk now.”

“Walking,” Jake says. They lurch along for awhile. Sometimes the belt tugs too hard and Jake can’t hang onto it, and then Cougar has to come back and give it to him again, making sure he’s got a grip on it. “God, how did I get out here this far?”

“I have no idea,” Cougar says.

“Jeez, how far have we gone? Has it been miles?”

“About thirty yards,” says the sniper.

Jake groans. “I think I’m getting drunker.”

“I think you are right. This is why I am bullying you into walking now, not blubbering on gopher holes.”

“Did you have my consent for that?” Jake says, sticking out his lower lip.

Cougar laughs.

“God, you’re so mean, you _are,”_ Jake says.

“And you’re pathetic,” Cougar says, chuckling.

“I am,” Jake agrees sadly. “I love your mean snarky secretive ass, but boy, it is a sorry, sorry one-sided love, that’s for sure.”

“What makes you think that? I rescued _your_ sorry ass from gopher holes.”

“Well, you give me _grief_ when you’re rescuing my sorry ass.”

“All part of the service. If it gets your ass moving, I will use it to make you move.”

“I gotta figure out a better way to get my ass-moving motivated. I mean, by something besides your mean, mean potty-ass mouth.”

“I can think of a few ways, but it would involve less drinking.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Shooting you comes to mind sometimes,” Cougar says, and he’s laughing.

“Shit, coming from you, that is _not_ a joke!”

“No?”

“No!”

“Oh, okay,” Cougar says, like it’s still funny as hell.

“I could just sit down right here, I could stop right here. I could dare you to shoot the shit out of me, like I’d even _care_ in the morning, see if you think it’s so funny,” Jake says.

“Uh huh, and you’re so damn impaired right now you couldn’t stop me if I spanked hell out of your sorry ass instead. Save your sister doing it instead.”

“Jaaaayzus, man, you are so-- so-- _shameless.”_

“Uh huh, I am,” Cougar says in Jake’s own flat Midwestern accent, mockingly. _“Borracho,_ talk about shame. You think Jennifer wouldn’t turn you over her knee and spank hell out of you?”

“Uumm,” Jake mumbles. Yeah, of course the sniper is right. Jennifer is a spanker when it comes to her little brother. She doesn’t spank her daughter, she says she’s evolved beyond that with ickle little bawling children having temper tantrums--because wow, Beth can blow into the biggest tantrums known to humankind, and Jennifer doesn’t give in one fricken’ inch, ever, she says she doesn’t dare or it’ll be a mile more by next time, and she’s probably right-- But hey, Jennifer loses her temper with Jake and it’s right back to the old days. Sometimes with pictures, if he’s blotto enough that she thinks he needs reminding later. Like, cell phone pix of him lying in a pile of flour and broken eggs in the kitchen with the fridge door hanging open just over his head to cool off his exploding burning eyeballs. Oh God, if any of the Losers had been there, the pictures would never end.

He’s horrified to realize that all of this has been falling out of his mouth and Cougar has been listening to it.

“I’d take pictures too,” Cougar says.

Jake groans. “How far?”

“You’ve done another twenty yards. You should keep talking, you do better on the walking with your mouth going.”

“Oh Gawwwd, Cougar, just kill me now!”

“And make Jennifer miss all the fun?”

“I hate you so much.”

“Good. Keep talking.”

“You’re a hateful, misanthropic, sadistic little bastard with a fucking President’s tab for your goddamn shooting and you won’t even use it to put me out of my misery--”

“ _Our_ misery.”

“Oh great, nice to know you’re sharing _my_ pain--”

“You have no idea, _borrachín,”_ Cougar says.

“Well, Mister Righteous, I’ll have you know that you do not make a pretty drunk at all, either. I mean, really, maybe hotter than the surface of the sun, but you know, not pretty. You get that thing going with the pinchy fingers on nerve spots nobody else has ever--”

“I know. That’s next if you don’t move.”

“You’re a horrible drunk! You break bottles and climb in the rafters and then you won’t come down until we have to go get Roque to make you, and half the time he’s blotto already and it’s really, really not a pretty scene, either--you’re so crazy you’ll yell all kinds of insane shit at Roque-- I mean, seriously, who yells gay crap at Roque about getting all jealous about that SHIELD guy, Fury-- jealous of other guys fucking the hell out of Clay, like what huge black badass guy wouldn't want to hump Clay like a dog just because it feels so good to fuck the hell out of hairy white _jefe_ ass-- oh Gawd what has been thought cannot be unthought, you horrible man-- well, you’re just meaner than a striped snake-- no, than a fucking weasel-- a goddamn DI, that’s what--”

“You missed one.”

“What?”

“Sergeant.”

“Oh fuck you very much!” Jake pants, and stops walking.

“Love to,” Cougar says.

“ _What?”_ Jake whines. Nothing makes sense.

“Keep walking,” Cougar says, and there’s amusement in his voice, there really is.

“Erm, I think-- I think this has been a damn long trek already, and I want to lie down. And maybe thinking about puking, but definitely lying down, and no spanking involved.”

“Weeeell, darn,” Cougar says in that flat Midwestern accent.

“You’re rude too.”

“Start walking, Pink Boy, or your nerve spots get it.”

“I’m tired!”

“Uh huh,” Cougar says.

“I’m sick of this! I’m tired, I just want to--”

“Believe me, so am I,” Cougar says.

Jake’s sneaker toe bangs solidly into wood. “Shit!”

“That’s the back door step,” Cougar says, steadying him. God, his hands are like iron, holding Jake up. He gives a little push forward, and Jake staggers into the back door screen.

“We’re here?”

“Almost. You go up that last step.”

“You’re fucking laughing at me. Again.”

“It’s hard not to,” Jennifer’s voice says.

“Oh shit,” Jake mumbles.

“That’s right, be afraid. Hightail it to the bathroom before you ralph on my clean floor.”

Jake clutches at his mouth.  The very words make him want to hurl. Making his legs move faster doesn’t help much when he’s banging into things. Hard, hard fingers grab onto his arm, his shoulders, jerk him this way and that, and finally, at long last, there’s cool porcelain resting against his forehead. The hands jerk him up by his hair and something nudges into his spine, pushing him forward, and Cougar’s voice says, “Now.”

The toilet gets flushed several times, and not by Jake.

Afterward, Jake leans one ant-bit arm along the bowl of the toilet. The soothing, cold, reasonably clean porcelain of the toilet. He’s seen worse.

“Uh huh,” Cougar says, like he’s answering what Jake said out loud. Hell, he did say it.

Jennifer says, “So this is fun. Jake will be out for the count for tomorrow, and have a rotten temper the next day. Good luck to us on gumbo retirement party day.”

Cougar grunts, washing something at the sink. Then he grabs Jake’s hair and pulls him back, _ouch._ “Drink this,” Cougar says.

“Erm?”

“Drink,” Cougar says, tipping one of Beth’s old sippy cups to Jake’s mouth. “Spit it out. More. Swallow. Okay. Pills now. Good. Now more water. Right. More. That’s good.”

“Fucking medic,” Jake mumbles.

“You’re welcome,” Cougar says, and pats Jake on the shoulder, and puts the cup in Jake’s other hand. “Drink some more when you can.”

“I love you too,” Jake mumbles.

“Yeah, try and remember it tomorrow,” Cougar says, and walks away. Closes the bathroom door. Which is strange, he doesn’t normally do that when he’s handling one of his drunken fellow Losers. Normally he comes and goes every few minutes, for, like, hours, and he leaves the door open so he can hear if they’re having trouble.

Why would he do that?

Oh yeah, because of Beth, sleeping upstairs. Right. Riiiiight. Little children, lots of them, Beth’s soccer team is coming _here,_ tomorrow. There’s going to be all the shrill loud niece questions tomorrow, about why Uncle Jake wants everybody to whisper, and why he isn’t going to come out of the guest room to come play with her in the blinding hot sunshine and the hot, hot grass and run around with the shrieking other kids and--

Jake groans.

The door opens.

“I am sorry. I am, too. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking, but boy, is this never ever happening again.”

“Good,” Jennifer says. “I already defaulted the soccer team meet to our backup mom, say thank you.”

Jake mumbles it.

“And you owe the girls a decent party in a month.”

Jake rubs his face, which hurts. “Okay, that’s doable.”

A toe nudges his leg. “Drink some more.”

Okay.” Jake squints in the bright horrible bathroom glare. “Hey, Jen. Cougs said I always have this conversation with him, and I never remember it later. It just never… sticks. I gotta have you remind me in the morning to ask. I gotta. He says I never remember.”

“What conversation is that?”

“I don’t know!”

“Oookay,” Jennifer says. “Are there any words involved with this thing you don’t remember? Like, gimme a noun. A verb, something.”

“Consent,” Jake says. “Like, its about giving consent for something.”

There’s a long silence.

“He says… he says I’m too blotto to… to give consent.”

“Oh boy,” Jennifer says.

“Remind me!”

“Okay, okay, sure, I will,” Jennifer says. She’s muttering something as she leaves. Something about bone-headed idiots. People who are too dumb to live.

Jake groans again. Christ, what a waste of a perfectly decent evening on _leave_ , for crying out loud. Why anybody would ever think this level of drunk was somewhere on the continuum of what’s called ‘fun’.... okay, talking _somebody els_ e into staggering around being silly at this level of stupid, sure. But wanting to send _yourself_ this far out beyond the orbit of Pluto? You’d have to be desperate. Sure, if the usual alternatives are shoveling pig muck as a peasant in Ukraine or Siberia or something, or wrangling llamas while starving to death on skinny li’l purple potatoes on the altiplano, or something dire and fucking depressing like that. When he’s a privileged fricken’ US Army commtech and he _could_ be playing online games via satellite link and stomping ghosts and zombies and levelling up his orc fighter?

What was he thinking? Oh, right, keeping up with guys with leather livers, like Clay and Roque, pretending he’s a big macho Spec Ops bad _bad_ mans, and by the way, also opting himself out of doing more hours and hours of boring shit chasing down Max’s endless lists of suppliers. _Boring._ Admit it, he’s been fighting the Max boredom for _weeks_ now. Weeks.

“Sí,” Cougar says, stepping in with a whisper of boot on linoleum. That’s him being nice for a change, making noise to notify Jake he’s there, but Jake doesn’t move.

“I told Jen to remind me about the thing, that thing I can’t remember. About consent. Because you won’t tell me, I know you won’t, if I ask you about it in the morning.”

“Ah,” Cougar says.

“Because you’re a fuckin’ tease, also,” Jake says.

“Drink some more water,” Cougar says.

“You are a tease,” Jake says, between sips.

“No, I am careful. I have to check with Clay when each of us is officially retired.”

“What’s _that_ got to do with it? Cougar, wouldja just please quite playin’ games and tell me--”

“You are outranked, Corporal, until the official dates we leave active service,” Cougar says coolly, and takes the sippy cup out of Jake’s hand.

Sink noises, and then he puts it back in Jake’s hand, blessedly cool on Jake’s hot fingers. Jake rolls it along his forehead, groaning. “Is it hot in here?”

“No. You’re getting to the hangover part.”

“Oh, damn. That was short-lived. Was it fun for you?”

“No.”

“You laughed, I heard you.”

“That’s laughing at _you,_ not at your drunk ass being silly.”

“Oh, right. Good. Wait.” Jake squints at the blur that’s perched on the side of the tub next to him. “I thought Coulson said-- wait, when he got off the phone tonight, I heard him tell Clay that Command was playin’ games with the paperwork, insisting we haven’t served out something like a year and half on our last reups?”

“Yes, the records are so patchy nobody’s sure, and Coulson’s going to send over one of his HR specialists to weed through the mess.”

Jake blinks at the blur perched on the side of the tub nearby. Cougar looks bigger than usual. Like, this big T-shaped guy who’s got killer shoulders. Literally, since he shoots people with them. And with the hands, too. Cougar’s hands are hyuuuuge. So are his legs. Like, thighs that can crack coconuts or something. Massive.

Oh, right, because Jake is dangling from the toilet bowl by one arm, sinking fast. He’s halfway down on the floor, looking up. Anybody would look big from that angle.

Jake opens his mouth. By then, what’s falling out of his brain isn’t what he meant to say at all. “Am I the only one having images of Natasha flipping through files wearing a lowcut blouse and kickass office pumps?”

“You have an overactive imagination.”

“Oh, yeah, _me?_ Am I _hearing_ this from the guy who--”

“She’d wear low heels and a blouse that buttons very high up on the neck, and a tight skirt. Gray wool, very tailored. With her hair pulled back hard in a tiny, tiny bun. And strict black glasses. Very strict.”

Jake groans. “You know, parochial school did something seriously kinky to your brain. But I liiiike it.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Perfume?”

“No perfume. Just one of those English floral soaps. You can only smell it up close, right near the bra cups.”

Jake makes one of those noises that only small dogs can hear. “Jeeezus, you’re mean, you’re so cruel, I can’t stand it--”

“Ah yes? But you always come back, begging for moooaare,” Cougar says, with that snooty Castilian accent he puts on sometimes. That upperclass lisp he can put on, man, it will cut you _dead._

Jake snorts. “Just for the record, when did _you_ get laid the first time?”

“When I was thirteen. I told, at that drinking game a year ago. That ‘never say ever’ game Roque likes.”

“Yeah, but nobody believed it-- Christ, _thirteen_ \-- because you wouldn’t tell anybody who it was--”

“You won’t like it,” Cougar says.

Jake squints at him. Remembers he has glasses, fumbles for them a moment. Cougar puts out a hand, stops him reaching into his pocket.

“Don’t.”

Jake puts out one hand toward the man, holding onto the toilet bowl with the other. “Okay. It’s okay. Later, right? When we have that other conversation.”

“Right,” Cougar says, dry as a an old bone. He doesn’t take Jake’s hand, either.

Jake puts it back on the toilet bowl, bracing himself better. Drags himself slightly more upright. “So Coulson’s gonna get us sorted on our dates getting banged out of service, and then we can have that other conversation, am I right?”

Cougar leans forward, rests his chin in his hand, braced up on a knee. He only does that when he’s tired. “He said the argument might go the other way, that we were already legally out, we never reupped correctly.”

“ _What?_ But that’d mean we weren’t officially on duty for the last year. So we-- shit, we wouldn’t be entitled to active duty privileges and hazard pay and we’d have to repay everything--” Jake blinks at him, trying hard to focus. This is why he can still hack systems when he’s concussed and shook up and shot and vomiting sick with a couple of tropical diseases. Oh yeah, and that’s also why Cougar is telling him stuff, too.

“Yes, everything over our correct retirement income.” Cougar nods at him.

“The _fuckers!_ They can’t have it both ways-- they can’t just--”

The plaid blur of Cougar’s shirt moves, making one of his shrugs. “Sure, if Ross’s bosses are running CENTCOM, who’d stop them?”

“But wait-- wait, that also means we wouldn’t be under black ops cover for whatall crazy shit happened with that nutty op in Upfuckistan, to quote Pooch.”

“Yes, exactly. We’d be liable for damages for all the ops we’ve done since then.”

“Oh shit, oh shit-- man, this stuff will sober your stoned ass in a hurry. Shit, we’d have to defend the team against criminal prosecutions for actions taken during a time we only count as private citizens, not as sworn personnel. We blew up that one house, you remember that general in Honduras-- see, that’d put us right back onto that NSA terrorist watch list, wouldn’t it? It would, I bet you it would. Fuck, Roque was right when he was saying Ross would put us back on that list the minute those SHIELD guys turned their backs.”

“Fortunately, they haven’t turned their backs. Also, Tony Stark is not buying into any of this.”

“He’s not?”

“No. He told Coulson to give him a call if they wanted any database forensics done on our records. Said he didn’t need to wait for passwords, either.”

“Oh shit, I bet Coulson loved hearing that,” Jake says.

“It might be an interesting flight back to New York,” Cougar says.

“Oh. I thought they left already. Huh. Is that why you decided to stick it out here?”

“No,” Cougar says.

“Then why--”

“Jake, what am I going to do with you?” Cougar says.

“You sound like my sister.”

“She is a woman of great good sense.”

“Oh man, I am sooooo fucked,” Jake says.

“You have no idea,” Cougar says, like it’s a promise. Then he stands up, shifts around Jake, makes more tap and sink noises. Then he drops down into one of his jungle ground-tracking postures, and puts up one wet hand and grips Jake’s chin. “Hold still.” He starts wiping a wet washcloth over Jake’s hot face. It’s almost a shock how cold it is, and Jake tries not to flinch. “Better,” Cougar says then, turning Jake’s chin a degree with his fingers. Shadowed under the hat brim, Cougar’s face is very close, peering at his eyes. “Okay. Drink some more and I’ll refill it.” Then he’s up again, moving away.

“Right,” Jake says, and starts slurping more water.

“You’re coming back online pretty quick, drunk as you were,” Cougar says, and pats his shoulder.

“Big ass liver,” Jake says.

“Big ass,” Cougar says.

“Well, yeah, it helps when you got tanked on too many beers. You should try it sometime.”

“What, growing a big ass? Much more likely I’d get a belly,” Cougar says.

“Yeah, like that’s ever gonna happen, you’d have to eat three times as much,” Jake says.

“My uncles did, when they retired,” Cougar says, rinsing out the washcloth and hanging it up.

“Hell, you’re not gonna sit still long enough for that. I saw you eyeing the doorknobs and screens and stuff around here.”

“It’s the least we could do, helping out your sister,” Cougar says sternly.

Jake leans on the toilet bowl. “Yeah, yeah.”

“While we _can.”_

“Shit, Cougar, that’s not fair.”

“Tell it to Ross.” And he’s gone, closing the door behind him.

“Oh man, Cougs is pissed at me again,” Jake says to the toilet bowl. “Cougar’s pissed that I got pissed, Cougs is really really pissed at how bad I got pissed--” he hums it for awhile, trying to get his unsteady stomach to hang onto the water for awhile longer.

“You can stop singing that now, we all heard you,” Jennifer says, opening the door. “If your boyfriend doesn’t speak to you for two weeks, it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What?”

“The rest of the guys all said good night, they’re going back to New York with Tony and Coulson and Steve,” Jennifer says.

“Wait, what?”

She closes the bathroom door.

“Story of my life,” Jake mumbles. Then he frowns at the empty sippy cup. _“Boyfriend?”_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I welcome any corrections and comments about slang from the community's Spanish speakers. I'm probably using language that's a little too formal for Cougar's typical style.
> 
> A longer phrase from Cougar,“¿Por qué iba a parar?” shows up as, "Why would it stop?" but also shows up in Google translate for, "Why would you stop there?"
> 
> I'm also aware that drunks in general are not always as cooperative as Jake. The complete lack of violence in this section might not be typical for the Losers (or anybody else) when impaired.
> 
> Also, while I'm okaaaay with the idea that Clay has a type that matches entirely too well with both Nick Fury and Roque, I'm really not ready for horrible things being said about it by other guys when drunk. (Reportedly. Note, the narrator is unreliable even when sober.)


	7. The Cat Responds to Petting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not like Jake hasn't been to bed with anybody, ever. He's even had some fun since he joined the Losers, but it was COMDEX, after all. Just nothing... recently. Besides, how could you ever be ready for a guy like Cougar, anyway?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NSFW m/m affection, bathing, shaving, kissing, and snark, only partly resolving some of that accumulated Unresolved Sexual Tension.

Jake turns a little in his nest of blankets, gropes out, slurps water from the sippy cup left on the nightstand by his head, and he sinks back into oblivion without thinking why his back is nice and warm and relaxed. When he cuddles up against the warm spot, he hears a familiar grunt. “Night night,” he mumbles.

This happens four or five times. The sippy cup is always full, but he feels no need to question it. For awhile he’s vaguely aware of tapping or banging noises, and maybe somebody cussing in Spanish. But mostly the house is silent, aside from the wind soughing at the boards of the siding near his head, and he doesn’t wonder about that either. He does occasionally wonder if it’d be a good idea to get up and unload all that water he’s been drinking, and mostly he rolls over and goes back to sleep.

But struggling up onto his feet and staggering into the bathroom happens a couple of times too. He doesn’t open his eyes. No point. The afternoon sun from all the windows--gaaaaaa, so many windows!--is blinding enough through closed eyelids. When he stumbles back to bed and falls onto the warm spot, it fends him off with a rather sharp elbow and another grunt. “Sorry,” Jake mumbles, and falls asleep while somebody else’s hand is still tugging blankets out from under his weight.

At some point he wakes up flailing, though he can’t recall if it was a bad dream, and the solid lump on the other half of the bed only stirs enough to hoist up a hatbrim and look at him. “Mmuhhh?” the shadow under the hat says.

“‘M okay, jus’ dream--nothing, it’s okay, go back to sleep. Oh shit, have I missed gumbo?”

“Uh uh. Sleep.” The hat brim sinks down over the face, and the lump settles deeper into all the blankets he stole from Jake.

Jake is not actually cold, he’s hot under the lone sheet left to him, it’s a warm still afternoon, so that’s okay too.

When he wakes up enough to consider what kind of dead creature crawled into his mouth to expire, and to wonder whether washing might improve the fuzzy state of his brain, it is starry dark outside the curtains, the moon has set, and the warm lump has co-opted Jake’s worst octopus impulses. There’s hot bare feet and furry shins tangled with Jake’s, there’s baking hot thighs, there’s a vast expanse of ribs holding up Jake’s arm, there’s a dense, meaty pectoral cushioning Jake’s head at an awkward angle, and warm minty-clean breath is blowing across Jake’s ear, down his neck. And there’s curls of hair tickling his nose, also smelling clean, smelling exactly like the best wet dream ever, and pretty much like… like Cougar’s shampoo.

“You’re not asleep, are you?” Jake says.

“Mmmnnnoo,” Cougar says, and stretches, sliding just his legs free of Jake’s, and then tightening his arm around Jake’s middle, and relaxing again. He murmurs in Spanish in Jake’s ear. Something about _macho cabrío._

Not what Jake expected, that’s for sure. “Uh. I guess. I stink like a billy goat?”

“Sí,” Cougar agrees.

“Uh,” Jake says.

“You should bathe,” Cougar murmurs, and stretches his arms this time, rolling Jake around onto his back. Cougar comes up on one arm over Jake, grins down at him with a flash of white teeth, and chuckles. “You’ll feel better.” And then he rolls away, disappearing into the dark. Which means...no briefs to pick up the light. That’s all skin.

Jake blinks up at the ceiling for awhile. Wow, that is… really not like Cougar, to run out of laundry. He always washes out enough clothes to keep the basics covered. Too much time on surveillance, the guy is fanatic about dripping too much sweat and leaving traces. Totally fastidious about his laundry. He’d never walk around like that with other people in the house, either.

Come to think, the place is awfully dark and awfully quiet. It’s sure not like that when Jennifer and Beth are around.

Jake rolls gingerly up on one elbow, and then swings his feet over the side of the bed, winces as he puts his toes down on the cold wooden floor. “Where’d everybody go?”

“Road trip,” Cougar says, flipping on the light in the bathroom in the hall. “Gumbo at Jolene’s. Jennifer took off two weeks from work, last day of school was last week.”

“And they didn’t invite me?” Jake says.

“I made nice excuses for you,” Cougar says, and there’s that amusement in his voice again.

Jake leans on the wall, wobbles up onto his feet, heads doggedly for the bathroom. He keeps his eyes squinted mostly shut, keeps his hand on the wall, but he’s heading into the glare of the bathroom light.

And wow. Yes, Cougar is naked. Yes, he’s hung the hat up on a hook on the door, and he’s looped his hair back in a crazy knot. He is leaning into the mirror, shaving, and making those silly faces to get at the untidy foamed bits that are hard to reach.

Jake reaches into the shower, turns it on to the right setting, drops his boxers, and steps in. Pees down the drain for awhile, might as well let it get washed away. He doesn’t bother to close the shower door, it’s clear glass anyway.

“Yowtch, you used up all the hot water. As you do.”

“We could fix that too,” Cougar says, squinting into the mirror.

Jake starts lathering shampoo onto his hair. Pauses to squint at the bottle. “Um, I think I grabbed yours.”

Cougar shrugs. “Back in the real world now, we can get more.”

After noisy splutterings and rinsings and yodeling about rubber duckies, Jake blinks into Cougar’s amused gaze.

“Hand me my toothbrush, wouldja? A skunk died in my dentures.”

Cougar gives that grunt that means he agrees. But he squeezes toothpaste onto Jake’s brush, and then he pushes the shower door wider, and he steps in, crowding up right next to Jake.

“You missed a bit,” Jake says, as he does sometimes.

“I know,” Cougar says, and holds up both his razor and Jake’s toothbrush.

Jake takes the toothbrush, holds up a silent warning finger, and the vigorous brushing of teeth makes Cougar grin at him. Sure, he could start humming, but let Cougar cling to his illusions that it’s one way to make Jake shut up.

“Okay, okay,” Jake says, and tosses the toothbrush over into the sink. “Okay, gimme the razor, cowboy, let’s see what we can do with those wild and woolly sideburns.”

Cougar hands it over, and stands there, big as life and twice as hot, looking up at Jake with that catly prideful thing going, that totally skeptical feline look of his. Naked. Wet. Prideful, and doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks.

“Right,” Jake says, and puts two fingers on Cougar’s chin, and by that touch, gingerly asks Cougar to tilt his head this way and that. “Not bad,” Jake says, concentrating, tidying up little furry Wolverine-ish bits here and there. The guy has a patchy beard, with faint little nicks and scars all over, and not from high school acne, either. Jake is timid at first, afraid that he’d be shaky with hangover, but his hands are steady on Cougar’s skin, and the damn hangover headache is there but not blinding. The cold water pouring down his back isn’t pleasant, but the chill is making his raw eyeballs feel better. He can do this for Cougar. “How do you want this line here? About like this?” He traces a little finger along Cougar’s cheekbone.

“Mmm,” Cougar agrees, and his eyelids drop, and the line of those holy fuckin’ amazing trapezius muscles bunched at the back of his neck actually loosen up and _relax. And then he closes his eyes._

“Want me to get your neck too?” Jake asks, cautiously.

Cougar just tilts up his chin, eyes shut. Jake rests a palm along the strap of muscle just below the hinge of Cougar’s jaw-- _sternocleidomastoid_ , repeats the imaginary high school science teacher who he always wishes he had, and never did--it’s always in a Bill Nye the Science Guy silly voice, which will amuse him until the end of time-- and Jake braces his other hand against that grip, and draws the razor down in long sweeps. Beautiful. Cougar is still as rock.

“Shoot, we’re shaved off all your cream,” Jake says.

“Right sink drawer,” Cougar murmurs, not opening his eyes or moving his jaw.

“Got it,” Jake says, reaching. Water splatters everywhere. “Okay, more cream.” He squirts some on three fingers and sweeps that along Cougar’s throat. “Got that Adam’s apple on you, lemme pull the skin from over here so I don’t nick you… I thought about being a barber, ya know, before I signed up.”

“Mmmmhh?” Cougar makes the noise somewhere up in his sinuses. The man’s throat cartilage is completely still under Jake’s fingers.

“Didn’t have the money for barber school.” Jake massages the man’s skin gently, brushing along the man’s jaw, checking for rough spots. “Okay, we got it, you’re good.”

Cougar makes a noise and tilts down his chin and shifts his shoulders around. Then he looks up at Jake, waiting for barberly assessment.

“Yeah. Lemme take a look now, make sure I’ve got everything even.”

“Mmmh?” Cougar says.

“Okay. Yeah, good for now. I oughta cut your hair, ask you to buzz mine, too, while things are quiet. How long we got to work on stuff? Two weeks?” Jake rinses off the razor, sets it over on the side of the sink.

“Yeah,” Cougar says.

Jake looks down into the man’s angular face, with the damp hair just curling away from his temples. “We could go through a lot of shaving cream in two weeks.”

Cougar’s eyes crinkle up at the corners into a wicked little smile. _“Es verdad.”_

“I kinda lost track of a couple things. Like, time frame. Are you and I retired yet?”

The smile widens. “As of three hours ago.”

“Oh. Okay. You got that official from Coulson and Clay and everything? Jeez. Okay. Wait, what about turning in all the gear--”

A shrug that says, _done._ “Clay and Roque will take it in, with Steve and maybe Barton to keep an eye out for ‘em.”

“So, you and me, _we’re_ unarmed?”

Cougar shrugs, makes a deprecating little moue with his lips.

“Cougs,” Jake says sternly.

The shoulders shift, pointing a direction. “In this county, we do not need to apply for a permit. Next one over, in the west part of town where all the stores are, we do.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I used your laptop to get the phone numbers.”

“Were you gentle?”

Cougar smiles. “Always.”

“Huh. Okay. I didn’t realize you went shopping for guns at some point.”

“We were in _New York.”_

“Yeah, but getting a permit on some anonymous Friday night special--”

Cougar lifts a forefinger, waving it back and forth, _no no no._ “New York has little tiny dealer’s shops for every special thing on earth.”

“Including guns?”

Cougar nods. “Barton negotiated a discount for me at a couple places. I’ve got three pieces here, and four more should be getting shipped here next week. I talked to the local shop about buying more ammo. They asked if I was available to teach classes at their range, I said I’d have to check on certifications.”

Jake starts to laugh. “Gaawwd, they were probably wetting their pants in lust.”

Cougar shrugs, gives that smug little smile that says, _well, of course._ Poor silly people, how could they help themselves? It is to be expected, no?

Jake scrubs at his scalp, raining water everywhere, rinses off his hands. Speaking of inappropriate feelings, he’s definitely having them, and judging by how close Cougar is, Cougar might know it in about five seconds if Jake doesn’t cool it on the mental imagery. But he can’t help it when he reaches out and sweeps his wet palms up Cougar’s cheekbones, swiping away stray bits of foam. Then he brushes his hands up and off Cougar’s temples, smoothing back those curls. “There,” he says.

Cougar just looks at him with those dark eyes. The bathroom light is bright enough that Jake can make out there’s an actual chocolatey color to the man’s irises, with some lighter honey-colored highlights. And those black, black gunbore pupils. Really big pupils. Waiting for something. He gets that look when he’s watching a target in motion, too. The big cat is poised, muscles loose, ready to leap out and--

Jake looks away. Clears his throat. “I asked Jennifer to remind me about something, but I guess she couldn’t, because I was still asleep when they all left.”

“Mmmm?” Cougar says.

“It was this word you kept saying. This word I just never remember when I’m trashed. Must be like I’ve got some kinda complex about it or something.”

“Consent,” Cougar says. He’s not smiling now.

“Yeah. Like, consent to…”

Cougar tilts his chin slightly. “Permission to do what you want.”

“Or maybe for you to do what you want?”

Cougar leans in, rests one wet hand on Jake’s wrist, and abruptly lets go. “I want a lot of things.”

“Yeah? I like a man with ideas,” Jake says.

Cougar’s eyes look all black, all pupil. “So do I.”

“I think I oughta ask you to do something about this.”

“This?” Cougar says, pointing, but not touching.

“I could beg, if you want,” Jake says, and smiles at the flare of Cougar’s pupils blowing wider yet.

Cougar leans away, picks up the tube of shaving cream off the side of the sink, of course drizzling water everywhere. He starts squeezing out cream on his fingers, looking over them at Jake. “I know you sat through the safe sex lectures.” He rubs his fingers together in the most lascivious manner Jake has ever seen. “But did you listen?”

Jake frowns. His voice sounds a little dry, shaky, when he speaks. “I remember every last word.”

“What should we be doing now?” Cougar says.

“Hello, this is your medic speaking,” Jake snarks back at him, and gets a grin for it. “Um, I got tested for STDs a month ago, and my last partner was...oh, maybe nine months before that.”

Cougar nods. “I was tested three weeks ago and my last penetrative intercourse was six weeks before that.”

 _Pe-nehh-trahh-tive innnn-ter-couuuurse,_ in that accent of his.

Gaaaaaaaa.

Brains, who need ‘em, really? The absolute _last_ thing Jake needs, at that moment, is to hear that niggling teacher voice in his head, but there it is. _Excuse me, but--_

Jake stares at him. “You picked up a couple of girls at that third fundraising gig of Tony’s. What, two weeks ago?”

Cougar waggles the fingers. Makes illustrative gestures with them. _“Es verdad._ But I had no desire to put on a condom and take risks. One does not need to insert tab A into slot B to make people very happy.  Besides, ehhhhhh, most people do not last long enough for me to get around to that.”  He shrugs.

Jake is staring at him. “Eeeerrrm.”

Cougar slants up an eyebrow at him, and he wiggles the deadly fingers again, making this...this moist, gooey, sliding _noise_ with the cream, all perfectly straight-faced.

“You’re a _menace.”_

“Good, I’m glad you know it,” Cougar says, still not cracking a smile. “Now what comes next?”

Jake frowns. “Negotiating boundaries?”

“Good, you remember. This part, I always tell noobs and the girls I just met, but the military lecturers do not tell their classes. They should. What did I say to you, the first day you came on the team officially? What did I tell those girls at the fundraiser?”

“You have to discuss what’s okay and what you really want and what is really not good for you. Like, what’s a serious turnoff. Like, I mean, some people really don’t like somebody treating them like they’re back in school again, and other folks really, really get off on it. Why am I thinking about Natasha in a really tight skirt and button-up blouse again?”

Cougar looks at him solemnly. “Because I’m not grabbing you and making it simple.”

“I don’t want you to make it _simple,_ I want you to-- to--”

“¿Sí?”

“I want you to do things that make you really happy. Whatever that is.” Jake hears this fall out of his mouth as if it’s coming from somebody else. “You’re always doing stuff that other people want from you. Other people say, hey you hot smexy boy, gimme this, or gimme that, and you do what they want. What do _you_ want?”

Cougar looks at him, both eyebrows raised. “I think I want to get out of the cold shower.”

Jake starts to laugh, watching Cougar rinse the foam off his fingers. “Okay, okay, we can do that.” He steps out after Cougar, he pulls down towels from the highest cabinet in the bathroom and flings one around Cougar’s shoulders and starts rubbing his hair dry. Cougar lets him, eyes half-closed. “You like that?” Jake asks.

“Sí. I want you to dry everything off for me.”

“Oh fuck,” Jake says, rubbing down the man’s back and butt and legs. He’s got a long torso, his legs are short in proportion, like he went hungry as a kid and he should’ve grown taller. His butt is all flat marathoner sheets of muscle, dense, not the kind of fat hockey-style loafs that a lot of guys develop under the classic Roque regimen of exercises. Cougar leans on him and picks up one foot at a time, letting him dry them off. “Cougs, I’m not gonna last, I’m--”

“Now you,” Cougar says, flipping a towel onto Jake’s head, and halfway tickling him as he pushes the towel around on Jake’s skin. “I am not going to last either. Stop with the funny looks, I am not made of stone.”

“Well, it looks pretty hard to me,” Jake says, snatching away the towel. “Is this the part where you say all the things you don’t want?”

Cougar looks at him. “Some things take too long to explain.”

Jake makes a face. “Really? I mean, you know I don’t know very much. Am I likely to fall into doing any of them?”

Cougar shakes his head.

“I’m sorry,” Jake says, inadequately.

Cougar reaches up and flattens his palm over Jake’s mouth. Then his fingers slide around the side of Jake’s jaw, and slide up over his ear, and tuck loose hair behind Jake’s ear. “Most things I like very much, do not worry. _¿Y tú?_   Is there anything you want to warn me about, any things that you do not want me to do?”

“Well, short of tying me to the bed and bringing in a marching band for the soundtrack--”

There’s an odd expression on Cougar’s face.

“Um, okay, _you,_ sure, _you_ could probably make me like _that,_ too, but hey, I know marching band bears a lot of blame for traumatic experiences for young people--”

Cougar’s hand comes up over Jake’s mouth again. Then he sighs, and lets the hand slide away again.

“--I mean, wearing a drum major’s uniform may be cool and all, but--”

“I will not wave a music baton at you,” Cougar says, straight-faced.

Jake stares at him, mouth open. That was a _joke._

Cougar’s eyes smile, but his mouth stays perfectly straight. That’s how he hides all kinds of shit under the hat brim, _laughing_ at stuff. “Anything else I should know?”

Jake flaps his hands. “I don’t know. I’ve only-- I mean, I just--”

“We don’t have to _do_ anything,” Cougar says.

Jake brings up both hands, grabs the man’s shoulders. “Cougs-- no, don’t, I didn’t mean--”

The eyebrow goes up.

“I want you to! I want you to do things. I want--”

“You don’t know what you want?”

Jake feels his face rumpling up into confusion. “Oh, I want all kinds of things. It’s just… so much.”

“Ahh.” Cougar’s hand pats his cheek.

“You’re laughing at me again,” Jake mumbles, flushing hot.

“That’s because you’re very funny and you make me laugh at myself too.”

“It’s very weird. It’s like I don’t even _know_ you-- this beautiful, seriously artist’s model gorgeous guy, all bare, I mean, without the hat and the guns and the backpack and--” he waves one hand helplessly. “It’s like you’re peeled off this whole other skin and you’re all new, this whole other person I don’t even know, and I had _no idea_ there was anything like _you_ inside the guy I got to know, and I mean I really really liked _him_ and-- “

Cougar puts a forefinger lightly on the tip of Jake’s nose. “Maybe that is because I didn’t know it either.”

“Erm? But you might not like it. I might get really attached to _you,_ like, totally. Just hopelessly. I mean like completely embarrassing sloppy and sentimental goo all over and I can’t help it--”

“Would you call it embarrassing to jump around yelling when the Petunias win?”

“What? _No!”_

“Does Beth find it embarrassing when you do that?”

“No. Well, sometimes a little bit. When I’m telling folks about her and the team, and she’s right there.”

Cougar nods, and pats him on the bare shoulder, which is sort of like getting patted by a hot leather glove. Then Cougar just turns away and starts picking things up, putting away the razor and Jake’s toothbrush and stuff, perfectly mundane things that force Jake to notice all over again that the man has a seriously amazing body. Too thin, but amazing.

“Cougs--”

“Mmmmh?”

“We do need to feed you up better.”

“Go lie down on the bed,” Cougar says sternly, and he turns out all the lights except one in the bathroom, which casts a dim light down the hall into the bedroom.

“Ah hah,” Jake says, pointing. “You’re a control freak!”

“What was the first hint?” Cougar says, walking naked down the hall with his dick bobbing along, and he puts the shaving cream on the night stand.

“Are you gonna--” Jake rolls onto his back, arms and legs wide, but shivering a little.

“No, I’m not gonna,” Cougar says. He rolls onto his side and leans over Jake, looking at Jake’s face in the dim light. “You can say do this, or do this, I will. You can say, stop, I stop. Any time. Talk to me, tell me things. It helps me know better what you like.”

Jake nods. The shivering is worse.

Cougar leans down, brushing the damp tips of his hair over Jake’s shoulder, and then he picks up Jake’s hand and kisses Jake’s wrist. “Tell me.”

Jake nods. “I just-- I just-- it’s like a bike, if you’ve never-- I need training wheels or something--”

Cougar smiles. He leans into Jake’s shoulder, rests his forehead against Jake’s neck, and then he’s just lying down beside Jake with one arm across Jake’s chest. “You do just fine at raising my blood pressure, no help needed.”

Jake puts one hand down along Cougar’s back, his bare naked back, which is still slightly damp, and he strokes the skin along Cougar’s spine. Cougar gives a little sigh and turns into it, humping up into the touch exactly like a cat being petted. He even mumbles like one when Jake pets his lower back, right above the hip bones.

“Okay, okay, I got this,” Jake says. Cats, man. Cats, he can do. He knows all the best spots for pleasing a cat, yes he does. He strokes back Cougar’s hair and runs his hands all over Cougar’s amazing body, and Cougar starts twisting around for him, making it easy, making noises sometimes. All the advice Jake’s ever read about how to make love to women, trying it out in this bed seems to work really well on Cougar. He’s got some weird erogenous zones like the inside of his forearms and the back of his earlobes and apparently the small of his back is a hot zone, but hey, Jake is willing to experiment.

Cougar arches up and starts breathing hard and saying things in Spanish and Jake has to back off a little and let him calm down twice when he starts rocking his hips really hard like he’s about to come. Cougar’s nipples are apparently wired straight into his dick, and Jake hasn’t even tried reaching for _that._ No point in literally blowing all the fun too soon, right? Because the man is going to come with anything touching along the belly or thighs, as hard up as he is.

“Is kissing going to feel good?” Jake asks.

Cougar groans, flopping over onto his back. “Yes,” he says, holding up both hands toward Jake in some kind of imperative.

Jake lowers some of his weight onto the smaller man, which he seems to like.

“Hey, hey, no rubbing off and cheating,” Jake murmurs into his hair, and then starts kissing his way along Cougar’s neck and face and chest until he finds the man’s mouth. Cougar helps him a bit on that. Jake was rather expecting the man to kiss like a vampire sucking the soul out of him, latching on forever like a remora hooked onto a shark, but no, not at all. Cougar’s mouth has a whole other style of its own, not like anybody else Jake has ever kissed before. He does lots of different things with his tongue and his lips, different types of touches and rhythms, all of it surprising.

“Let me,” Cougar says then, and Jake rolls onto his back and lets Cougar kiss his way all over Jake’s body. He seems to like doing that. The noises that Jake makes are not dignified and they’re not pretty and they’re not the stuff of high romance. They’re pretty embarrassing, truth be told. Some of them, at the end, squeal up into those high noises that drive yappy dogs berserk.

“Eeeeeeeeee,” Jake moans. “I’m gonna, I’m gonna-- I’m--”

“Not yet,” Cougar says, and pinches one ear, making Jake yelp in an entirely different way.

“Argggh!”

“Oh no, I didn’t ask first, that is bad. _Lo siento._ No more pinching, okay, I promise.”

“Oh Gawwwd, you could probably make me like that too, if you work on it long enough,” Jake says.

“I don’t think I can hold out that long,” Cougar says.

“Need some cream for that?” Jake says, looking down.

“Mmm. ¿ _Y tú?”_

“Definitely,” Jake says. “Why don’t you--aaaaaahhh ahahahah gawwwd I’m-- fuck, I’m coming-- and that’s-- that’s it, that’s all she wrote, gaaah, end of the cartoon, boys-- Cougs? Cougs!”

Jake puts one hand, laden with shaving cream, on the man’s dick, and the man bucks around on the bed like a dying salmon, and he’s _screaming._ There is no other word for it. He struggles around and buries his face in a pillow, maybe he’s trying to muzzle himself quiet, and he’s still hitting a strange high note that makes the mirror in the bathroom rattle oddly in the frame. He’s screaming for a good full-on complete minute, which is lungpower of a fairly serious caliber. When he finally stops, he’s wheezing for air instead, and Jake yanks the pillow away, freeing the man’s face.

“Okay,” Cougar says, eyes shut. “All okay now.” And he just melts down in place and lets Jake cuddle him close, flopping around whichever way Jake wants to move body parts. After some effort, Jake gets him to respond enough to say, “I’m okay now. All good.”

“It is?” Jake says, alarmed.

“Sí,” Cougar says, and curls up in Jake’s arms and goes to sleep as if he’s passing out. He doesn’t wake up when Jake moves him around, and he doesn’t stir when Jake shifts out from under him and pulls the covers over him. Watches him breathing for a few minutes.

Then Jake grabs his phone and goes into the bathroom and peers at himself worriedly in the mirror. What the hell did he _do_ to Cougar?

It’s not like he didn’t _know_ about this, it’s not like anybody could keep it a secret. Cougar screams like his namesake when he really gets off, everybody knows that. There’s some hysterical reading about it in his medical files-- theories about childhood repression and refusing to give up control and fighting it when he finally does let himself cut loose on an orgasm. Lots of ideas that Cougar’s got a heavy-duty libido kept on an excessively tight leash, which sounds more like wishful thinking by therapists than anything the patient would have told them.

Of course Jake hacked his way into most of those files. He was puzzled at all the fuss about the man’s perambulatory sex life, which is pretty harmless compared to some of the stuff Cougar has been known to do.

Prime example, Cougar’s snap reaction to guys who sound like Max’s voice. Cougar’s sidearm comes out and disappears again before most of them ever saw anything happening, thank God.

What Jake worries about is the really crazy stuff that nobody on the team seems to want to explain to him. What is it with the jokes about Roque and stairs? Pooch, for one, keeps acting like it’s never going to happen again, those were unusual circumstances. Maybe so, but other weird circs could come up any time, especially with Max involved.

The phone rings, on cue. Jake answers, “Hi, Missus Strauss, how are you? I’m so sorry. I tripped on something and it hurt. Boy, I mean, my feet, it hurt a lot. No, no, I’m fine. No, really, we’re both fine, do you want me to drive over to let Mister Strauss know we’re all okay? Oh, okay. Pinochle, huh? You guys, always the party animals over there. Yeah, I had Jennifer’s house line roll over to my phone, so it’d always get answered--no, it wasn’t difficult, you just-- oh, really? I didn’t know that. Huh. Thanks. And sorry again. Gooood night.”

Yeah, you have to be firm with Missus Strauss, she does like to chat. She always asks what kind of work they’re doing, and he never has a good answer for that one.

Jake peers into the mirror and sighs. Christ, the endless searches for Max’s minions, there’s something to look forward to, while Cougar wants to bash hardware repairs into place instead. “You know, just fuck Max, and fuck the minions, we’re gonna do what Cougs feels like doing for awhile. Hell, if he just wants to _sleep_ for two weeks.”

To be fair, Jake’s only heard the booty yowl from a distance before, with some pretty thick wall insulation in the way. It’s totally different when Cougar is practically having a heart attack in bed with him, whipping around as if he’s having a seizure right there in Jake’s arms. Jake understands the panicky tone in the files a little better now.

It makes him wonder about the other stuff that got redacted and dismissed and glossed over. Stuff that maybe reflects a whole lot more on the shitty jobs the government assigned Cougar to do. There’s the sniper’s understandable habit of grabbing his guns and climbing the rafters during his PTSD eps. When he’s not sleeping very well he’ll start climbing in and out of windows and coming inside from dormer windows on the roof. Not like that’s unique to him, apparently a lot of snipers get that one.

There’s been some long periods when Cougar was only eating vegetarian MREs, wouldn’t touch anything else, and the records comment how he got alarmingly skinny then. There’s Cougar’s deep and abiding mistrust of hospitals and hospital personnel, which by the way saved Jake a lot of grief on treating the lacerated feet, but it makes Jake wonder what kind of Ross-style psychiatric facilities those assholes put him through.

Cougar has a powerful dislike for jokers locking doors on him and sudden loud noises and firecrackers. There’s Cougar’s odd distaste for changing currency, which often involves visiting banks, which he _really_ hates doing--something about locked vaults and getting beat up by security guards, not just reasonable caution about showing up on surveillance tapes.

He didn’t like security cameras either, until Jake came onboard and showed the team how they could turn those systems around and make truly excellent hostile use of the annoying little fuckers. The man has since developed a scary level of reliance on what Jake says about tech and data mining and what’s factual and what’s not.

Jake washes himself off in the bathroom, looks blearily into the mirror. “Houston, we have a problem.” He holds up dripping hands. “These hands are weapons. Lethal weapons.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jake's comment about thinking of being a barber was also prompted by LadyJanelly's fabulous AU story Walk a While With Me, about self-hating Cougar getting rescued by the AU Jake who was forced out of the Army, who became a hairdresser. That's here.  
> http://archiveofourown.org/series/22426
> 
>  
> 
> Consult the earlier story, "Cougar Shot Down a UFO," for the backstory on the Losers joking about Roque and stairs.


	8. Jake Experiments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's hear it for Educated Geek Boys with Some Knowledge of Anatomy and an Interest in Further Applied Lab Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NSFW, more swear words, lots of m/m kissing, discussion of oral sex and sex toys, and a digression on the intimate uses of the prostate gland. Also, risk of nosy neighbors.

Jake addresses the mirror solemnly, flexing his wet hands. “Deadly weapons, capable of reducing a strong man to shrieking above supersonic frequencies, and then collapsing in the most final orgasm I’ve ever seen. A really strong man, too. I think I’m gonna have the bruises for weeks. My God, Jake, you could kill him if you’re not careful with these things.”

He nods solemnly at the mirror.

“With great power goes great responsibility. You have a duty to… get the Cougster to eat. Get him to sleep for days. And pet that awesome, awesome libido until it rolls over and purrs for you. Not an easy job. But we can handle it, with these.”

“And we haven’t even got around… to the _serious_ options.” He rounds his mouth into a circle, making faces in the mirror. “Huh. No way is that ever going to look dignified, it’s just gonna be silly all the way-- and crap, I think he might break me into tiny, tiny pieces if _he_ goes for that option-- “

“What option is that?” Cougar says, from the doorway.

Jake leans on the sink, gasping. “Shit, I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Yes, you did.  I yelled.  I yelled loud enough to break up Missus Strauss’s pinochle game.  You will never be able to look her in the eye again.”

“I haven’t looked her in the eye since I was in high school.  She’s an _English teacher.”_

Cougar frowns.  “Right.  No split infinitives.”  The eyebrow tilts up.  “I could pretend my English is muy--”

“And she’ll catch you at that.  I’m warning you, twenty-five years at it, she’ll tell you that herself.  No ninja sneaking, either.  She’s got eyes in the back of her head, and plus, she’s thick as thieves with Jennifer, and--”

Cougar gives him the eyebrow again.

“I’m not saying you couldn’t sneak up on her-- you’re probably the only person in the state who could--”

“Yeah, that’s kind of been my job,” Cougar says.

“--I’m just saying the consequences will be _nuclear.”_

“Claro,” Cougar says, and scrubs at his eyes, and yawns.  When he holds out one hand, Jake puts the refilled sippy cup into it.

Somehow, watching a sleepy rumpled Cougar drink from a kid’s sippy cup is not the silliest thing he’s ever seen. It’s not. When Cougar is done Jake sets the cup aside, puts his arms around the smaller man, and hugs him.

“Mmm, warm,” Cougar says, resting his head against Jake.

“You only love me for my biomass,” Jake says into the man’s tangled hair.

“Oh no, I love you for your amazing nonstop mouth too,” Cougar says.

“But is it a mouth that can begin to meet your standards for-- other options.”

“What options?” Cougar mumbles, and kisses Jake’s chest.

“Uhh, like putting your dick in and letting me have my wicked way with you--”

Cougar nuzzles the shivering pink nipple on Jake’s right pectoral. Licks it. “You want to suck dick?”

“No, I want to suck _your_ dick,” Jake says, mildly under the circumstances.

“Not anybody’s dick, just mine.”

“Yeah, because that’d be queer, if I wanted all kinds of dicks, right? And clearly I like pictures of all kinds of naked people, or nearly so, I mean, you must have seen the porn folders on the laptop--you wouldn’t pass up the chance to look at that, would you? Of course not. So I put up some folders of women too, some of them were just for you. Really, I did.”

“I saw those. Some nice ones, on the women. And what’s with all those bulgy hairy guys with the gang tats and boots?”

“Best I could do, nobody looks like you.”

Cougar looks up at him, tilts his head to one side. “But everybody wants to look like you. Or have somebody who looks like you.”

“More like Uncle Steve, admit it.”

Cougar makes a face. “I’d feel l like I was coming all over a national icon.”

“Which hey, you would be. Now, there’s a really hot image, you coming all over--”

Cougar slants up the eyebrow. “And you’re not queer.”

“No, I just wanna see if I can make you scream like that all the time.”

“Yes. No question remains. You might break me,” Cougar says, regarding Jake’s nipple with a fond expression. Licks it some more. Sucks a bit.

“Cougar, I just came really, really hard, like the hardest ever in my life, and I should be daaaid for three days, and you can’t possibly-- get me hard again-- but-- that’s _ridiculous--”_

“You wanna try sucking my dick,” Cougar says.

“I kinda wanna try tasting your everything, if you really wanna know. Or even if you didn’t.”

Cougar says, “That might make me scream a lot.”

“Yeah, I was really glad you sent everybody away, because I don’t think I could stop wanting to make you do that. Even if it’s kind of scary.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you knew about it.”

“Sure, assholes who shall remain nameless told these lying liar jokes, man, but it’s not the same.”

“And you still want to suck my dick?” Cougar says.

“Yeah,” Jake says, breathing faster.

“I think I have a duty to demonstrate some technique here,” Cougar says, totally straight-faced.

“There’s a ton of gay pornos about this, isn’t there, Sergeant?”

“Retired,” Cougar says, and licks a stripe down Jake’s belly, pulling a little with his tongue and lips on the furry trail of hair leading down to Jake’s rigid, absurdly hard dick--and then he’s kneeling in front of Jake, and-- jeezus, what the man is doing to Jake’s scrotum is probably illegal in a dozen states-- and then he stops everything and picks up a condom packet from somewhere, and tears it open, and he only puts his hot leathery hand around Jake’s dick to hold it in place, he hasn’t even had a chance to put the condom on it, and Jake jerks and comes all over his hand, just from that.

“Well, good for you,” Cougar says, looking at it.

“Put it on yours,” Jake says, gasping.

Cougar looks up under his eyebrows. “You want to suck latex?”

“Anything,” Jake says.

“Hmm. Let’s take this to bed, give you some time to breathe.” He tosses the torn packet into the trash, and he never does end up getting another one out that night.

Somehow Jake always ends up trying something else and Cougar is right there, taking it a dozen notches hotter than anything Jake’s ever imagined, and then Cougar leads him back around to trying some other amazing thing that does Jake in _again._ Cougar finally loses it, screams his head off, and conks out on Jake. He wakes up in Jake’s arms pretty quick, only an hour later, and he mumbles something about telling lies to Missus Strauss again. And about Jake breaking him completely.

“Hmm, oh, like a bronco horse or something?” Jake says.

Cougar makes a noise. One of those defeated, amazed, despairing sorts of noises.

“But we haven’t even done any of that ride ‘em Brokeback cowboy stuff yet-- and I still wanna suck your dick--”

Cougar groans.

Jake laughs. “You guys didn’t know how much I jack off all the time?”

“No,” Cougar says.

“Well, I didn’t know you oughta be called Three-Legged Carlos, either.”

“I didn’t either,” Cougar says.

“Huh?”

Cougar touches Jake’s chin. “I do not find most guys turn me on so much.”

“Flattery, man, you’re gonna get your wicked way with me and then--” Jake sighs.

“And then turn around and cook breakfast for both of us, and then when the dishes are done, suck you off on the kitchen table,” Cougar says.

Jake makes a choked gurgle.

“Or maybe one of the chairs,” Cougar says.

“Gaaaaa,” Jake says.

“And then maybe we do some fixing up, and we have fun in the shower getting cleaned up, and I take you to bed with some lube for the afternoon--”

“You have _lube?”_

“And gloves, and condoms? Home, in the states, always,” Cougar says.

“The man with the plan,” Jake says, sounding a little breathless.

“This is my big queer agenda, teaching you all my wicked bad boy ways.”

“Oh please, would you?” Jake says.

“I think you will like it. We’ll go slow, let you try how it feels, getting me stretched out and ready for you. You are big, Jake, you know this. I like it but not everybody likes sex that way, it depends how you’re wired.”

“Ummm,” Jake says.

“What, you thought I will throw you down and ride you like a pony and not teach you anything?”

Jake rests a hand on Cougar’s ribs, strokes the skin. “Umm, you know, it’s a--strangely attractive idea, Cougs, thinking about-- about you _fucking_ the ever-lovin’- _hell_ outta me, but maybe that’s because I know how good you are at everything else we try. I mean, I know how the parts work, or how they are for some guys anyway, but I just-- I don’t-- I didn’t expect-- you to say it.”

Cougar stretches and rolls his side into Jake’s hand, sighs. “I expect it to feel marvelous, to feel you fucking me inside.” He takes Jake’s hand, spreads it out on his belly just below the line where his abs attach to the public bone, where his pubic hair starts. “The right angle will make your dick hit the back of my prostate, which is just under here. Some guys, it does nothing. Other guys, it almost hurts them if you poke them here. And others learn how good it is for them and they buy sex toys so they can have this all the time.”

Jake brushes the man’s pubic hair. It feels wiry, like his beard, and Jake never tires of touching him in all those forbidden, personal, intimate places that smell of sex. “You didn’t have toys packed in your stuff, not with the team, did you?”

“No. No point in it when we were always leaving luggage behind and working with Company agents and trying to stay under the radar on DADT. I was starting to get sloppy about that, because fuck, what the fricken’ hell diff did it make, anyway?”

Jake smooths down the flat plane of the man’s inner thigh, strokes along to his knee. Cougar makes a restless noise and flops his knee wider, tilting up his hips, giving Jake access to touch more, if he wants.

Jake rolls up onto an elbow, says, “Do you have any of that stuff handy now?”

Cougar points his chin toward the nightstand.

“You mind if I try a few things?”

“It’s all good,” Cougar says.

Jake leans in, kisses the man on his mouth for a long, sweet moment. Cougar’s mouth tastes of coffee and melted chocolate and sex, and that’s just from licking Jake all over in regular places that don’t need precautions. Then Jake rummages in the dim light from the hall, and finds the gloves, and the lube, and the condoms. “Okay, tell me about sex toys you’d buy, and what you’d do with them to please yourself,” Jake says.

Cougar chuckles. He throws the covers further aside. “Put on one of the gloves, put the lube on the first three fingers, and start by putting in one.”

“You want me to?”

“I want you to put your fingers in me,” Cougar says, still sounding amused. “I’ve got _you,_ what do I need toys for? You’re the biggest, coolest sex toy ever.”

Jake gives a choked laugh. “Yeah, thank you, Sergeant Sexalot, but I wanna find stuff to make you happy later on, too.”

“You think I will get bored with you?”

“Well, we don’t know, do we?”

Cougar rolls around on his back, plants his bare feet wide on either side of Jake’s knees, and spreads his arms wide too. “I think I am not doing something right if you get bored.”

Jake looks at him in the dim light. “I think you’re trying to fry my brain, and it’s working.”

Cougar hoists up an eyebrow, and gives a little wriggle that makes his dick bounce on his thigh and by God, it’s starting to thicken up and swell in place, like Jake staring at him is a turn-on all by itself.

Note to self, Jake thinks, Cougar likes you to look at his junk. He likes it even better when you touch, but he likes the looking. Add exhibitionist to the list of the man’s traits.

“Tell me about sex toys,” Cougar says, and licks his lips.

“Yeah, right. They’ve got all these different sorts of toys these days, I don’t even know where to start, or what you’d like. The glass dildo toys, I can see where you could warm them or chill them and stuff, but they seem kind of alarming, we’re not exactly the world’s most sedate guys when we’re coming hard-- okay, here’s the first one, incoming--”

“Ahhh,” Cougar exhales, tilting up his chin.

“Is it warmed up enough?”

“No, but I’m-- okay--”

Jake gropes around. “Houston, we have liftoff, that is a go, first stage is a go.”

“Haaa,” Cougar gasps, and his belly tightens, arches.

“Got it,” Jake says. “Right-- there--”

“Aaahhhah.”

“Is that an okay yes, or a nice grunt, or a ‘fucking hell that’s no good stop now’ grunt?”

Cougar breathes hard. “Nice. Too nice. I’m-- Oh-- “

“Breathe there, take your time.  Ready?" Jake slides in another lubed finger past the tight, tight ring of Cougar’s puckered little hole.  It clamps down painfully hard, and he holds still, resting his other hand on Cougar’s belly, sliding his palm around gently along the small of his back and along his chest. "Okay, Houston, there’s the second stage.”

Cougar flips up a hand to swat at Jake, who just ducks and laughs.  It’s one of the few times that Jake’s dodging succeeds.  “I am not called Houston!”

"No?  You look outer-space-awesome to me!”

Cougar growls.

Jake’s other hand finally starts stroking along Cougar’s dick.  The dick has gone hard already, and it shudders a bit under the touch.  “Too much?  Too sensitive?”

"Uhhh,” Cougar says, and raises his knees higher.  “More.  There.”

"We can do that.  Houston, we have the third stage up on deck--” Jake slides in a third finger.  Not all of them can reach that special spot Cougar clearly likes, so he adds more lube and pushes them all in deeper, which makes Cougar moan louder.

Jake curls his fingers upward, stroking that spot slowly, and feels Cougar’s belly muscles trembling. Odd sensation. He starts moving his other hand on Cougar’s dick, stroking it at the same rhythm, and he starts pulling the foreskin down, and finally touching the sensitive head into the palm of his hand. Then pushing his palm onto it.

“Aaaaaaaa,” Cougar groans, hips pushing up into Jake’s grip, and then he’s flung his legs wide and he’s thrusting into Jake’s hand, and come is dripping on Jake’s hand. No screaming, either. Just that one long groan.

Jake moves his fingers on the man’s prostate one last time, and Cougar’s body muscles lock up tight, and he shudders up into a c-shape and stays that way for awhile.

“Okay, easy there,” Jake says, and has mercy on the poor man’s internal organs, easing back. “Okay, let me know when you want me to pull out here.”

Cougar starts breathing again, sharp snorts of air, and his belly loosens up, and his body slackens out flat on the bed, carrying Jake’s gloved hand with it. Jake shifts lower to accommodate this, fascinated. Eventually Cougar lifts one hand and flaps it weakly, lets it fall back on the bed.

"Okay, pulling out,” Jake says solemnly.  He moves slowly.  “Houston, we have separation.”

Cougar’s hand threatens to swat, without actually rising from the bed.

The glove makes a ridiculous noise as he pulls it off, inside-out, and dumps it in the trash can in the night stand.

Cougar breathes for awhile, knees flopped wide as a frog in a completely absurd posture. The man is unnaturally flexible, and he probably doesn’t stretch all the time for anything sexual, but it must be incredibly useful in bed. “Jake?”

“¿Sí, mi corazon?” Jake uses his clumsiest high school accent.

Cougar breaths out a soft laugh. “I do _not_ need to teach you how to fuck. You are doing just fine on your own. You are taking me all to pieces.”

“Kind of the point, right?”

“Haaa,” Cougar breathes.

“You okay? Not too rough on your bung hole there?”

The hand doesn’t even rise from the bed, waving it off. “‘s good,” Cougar says. “‘s really good.”

Jake leans in and kisses the man’s forehead. “Sleep.”

“Huhh,” Cougar says, with his eyes already closed.

Jake heads back for the bathroom. He salutes the mirror. “Mission accomplished. If that’s what surprise buttsex does to the Cougster, who is, like the hardest-grain macho distilled to a fine liquor that can spontaneously combust without any help, then I have a scary idea what it’s going to do to me, who is not exactly the world’s most hardened Spec Ops GI Joe who gets up from mere woogie-squoogie dick play like it’s no big deal. Hell no. The local church-going nutbars are right to be terrified of Teh Gay, they might end up groveling to get fucked up the ass by hookers all the time if it feels that good. Take me, for instance. I might end up being a complete ass whore spending all my pathetic retirement check on batteries, dildoes and cheap tricks. I do not know what I can do to keep up my facade of being a jerkwad of a commtech who jacks off to game porn and eats cereal instead of dick.” The bleary face in the mirror blinks back at him. “Mission Post-Breakfast: Get Cougar spread out on that kitchen table and suck him till the cows come home-- oh shit, we need to check the chickens. How long has it been?” Jake sighs. “Check the laptop, that’ll have the dates. Whew. Okay. Not now. Go cuddle the Cougster, get some covers on him before he gets cold. Right. Over and out.” He dries his hands on a towel and goes back to bed, pulls up the covers, and crawls in with the nice warm lump.

“Mmmpphh,” the lump protests.

“Oh good,” Jake says, pleased at getting any response, and threads his arms and legs around the lump, snuffles at the back of Cougar’s shoulder. “Mmm, cranky kitteh is so cute.”

Cougar’s hand comes up, tugs on Jake’s arm, pulls it closer around him, rolling his weight into Jake’s belly as if Jake is an enormous blanket.

”Better?” Jake asks.

“Mmmm,” Cougar mumbles.

“You’re adorable,” Jake says.

Cougar replies with a negative sort of grunt.

“And very well-shaved,” Jake says.

“Uh huh. Sleep.”

“I could sleep,” Jake says.


	9. Kitchen Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We're not talking home improvement shows, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> M/M explicit safe sex, domestic more-or-less bliss, and the usual swearing,

Jake turns over slowly in bed, flapping his hand around in the empty spot. The light on the curtain says it’s early, not quite dawn. The smell of coffee hangs in the still air.

There’s a thread of music coming from the hallway, not what Jennifer would have on her radio presets. Then there’s a voice humming along to it, although the songs go through a ridiculous sequence of tango, salsa, norteno, something in neuvo flamenco. Which, come right down to it, amounts to playing folk songs in Breton, Gaelic, Old English, Hochdeutsch, and Swedish, while calling it “Western.” A blast of hyped-up Spanish about used car sales erupts, followed by something syrupy and awful in a quavering tenor voice, dribbling soulfully all over whatever object of devotion is being “mi amor”ed all over. Cougar gives a snort of amusement in the kitchen.

Jake has a moment of white-hot panic, remembering that the man could have gone anywhere he wanted in the world. He did not have to put up with the limitations of this place, he did not have to follow Jake here. And Jake is only here because this is where Jake’s sister was able to find work. Emphatically not because she wanted to join this particular community and take part in their quaint religious ceremonies and tolerate the parenting habits of the local school PTA, and so on. Yeah, why pick this place to stay? A place which Jake is afraid will only like Cougar for his shooting, and probably not for anything else.

Although, to be fair, Cougar made some friends at the store, apologizing for reacting badly to the fallen jar and offering to help clean it up, and nobody seemed to have a problem talking to him there.

Maybe it won’t be so bad as it’s been in some places, with the whole multicolored team of Losers glowering at racist, jerkwad locals in small Southern towns with a bad, bad history.

Jake propels himself into the bathroom, gets his face sorted out, staggers back to the bedroom for clothes. A neat pile of green and brown fatigue cloth is sitting folded up on top of the dresser, all his. Clearly, Cougar woke up at his usual time before dawn and got busy with the laundry. By the smell of bacon threading into the hall, he’s working on food too. Jake pulls on clean clothes, gets his socks on, laces up his boots.

Then Jake picks up an umbrella from the stand by the front door, and advances into the kitchen with the tip extended in a low fencing position.

“Tell me who’s getting killed,” he says.

Cougar shakes his head. “Long story.”

“I could get out the laptop and find you some telenovelas--”

Cougar quirks up an eyebrow. “No, but maybe later. Thanks.”

Jake gives a saluting flourish with the umbrella, and departs to return it to the usual place. When he comes back, Cougar simply points at the overhead cupboards.

Jake gets dishes sorted out on the table, and Cougar starts putting hot food on them, and when he’s done putting the pans to soak, he comes over and puts both arms around Jake, who hugs him back rather hard. “Thank you,” Jake says.

“¿Por qué?”

“Everything. The laundry, the cooking, putting up with our local--” Jake makes a frustrated gesture with one hand in the direction of the radio.

“Oh, they’re pretty funny. Although I don’t think they intend it.”

“Yeah,” Jake says.

“Mi mama loves that stuff,” Cougar says.

Jake gives him an appalled look, and Cougar grins. Cougar pats him on the back, and lets go, and waves at the plates of food.

Jake hesitates.

“The chickens are fine, I gave them water,” Cougar says, reading his mind as usual.

“Oh good,” Jake says, and flops into his chair. “Umhmhmhm, coffee, OhMaGerrrd, my drug of choice--”

Cougar grunts, but he looks pleased. “Your sister left us a bag of nice beans.”

“Uhhhh, was there a note?”

“Of course,” Cougar says, smiling. Damn, he has a lot of teeth. White, white pointy teeth.

“Uhhh yeah?”

“With the name and phone number of a chocolatier who’s just started up a store in town.”

Jake blinks at him. “Okay, I can take a hint. You’re gonna be their best customer--”

Cougar just smiles that smile at him.

“Okay, okay, _I’m_ gonna be their best customer,” Jake amends hastily. “Buying stuff to see if _you_ like it.”

Cougar points a forefinger at him, emphasizing that point, and then he picks up his fork. He makes a happy face, mouth full. “Mmmm, good eggs. Nice birds. Need to coon-proof their coop and tighten up the fence. Get some feed and grit in town.”

Jake nods. “I figured that was near the top of the shopping list.”

“Jennifer’s landlord stopped by,” Cougar says.

“What? I didn’t hear--”

Cougar shrugs. “Quiet. He was on that raid on the ranch the other day, volunteer sheriff. I guess a lot of their emergency services are volunteers. Jennifer let him know we’d be here while she was gone. He was cool with that. Asked if we wanted any help on repairs to let him know. Got the impression he didn’t say that to Jennifer, like maybe he thought it wouldn’t sound right, creepy or something. Apologized for the previous landlord’s neglect of the place.”

“And he wants to recruit you for deputy, too, right?”

Cougar shrugs. “He knows we’re Spec Ops, we’re not trained as cops, we’d need to do some work to get our heads rearranged for that. He knows you’re more computer-oriented too. Said the sheriffs could really use some help getting their computer system fixed up.”

“I hope the guy knows that would take a whole other set of approvals and certifications and-- I mean, working network IT on a cop shop isn’t the same as just opening up a little repair hutch in the mall or something.”

“Yeah,” Cougar says.

“Huh. I don’t think I’ve heard Jen say anything about him before.”

Cougar flicks up an amused look under his brows. “He’s a big guy, a little younger than us, some kind of lawyer for his main job, no wedding ring. Cute in a big giant lumberjack way, like Thor or Steve. Concerned about Jennifer and Beth, asked the right kind of questions.”

Jake squints at him. “Not Max-type material, and probably not some kind of stalker or creepy pedophile, is that what you’re saying?”

Cougar shakes his head. “I got his card, so you can check him out. Breakfast first. Then measurements for the coop. You’ll want to enter those on your laptop anyway, right?”

Jake nods, distracted. “You made us oatmeal too?”

“This is what I’ll need to do to keep some weight on while we’re doing repairs and stuff. You’re not eating enough of the good stuff either,” Cougar says.

Jake looks at him. “How hard do we want to work on repairs? I mean, if we’re leaving when Jennifer and Beth get back, it’s a different situation than if we’re here for awhile longer, and different yet if we want to go settling in, volunteering for stuff.”

Cougar shrugs. “One task at a time, see how things go, see how we like it here. Start doing some roadwork, get our stamina back up, keep our options open in case we want to retrain to be cops or whatever.”

“How do you like that idea?”

Cougar shrugs. “‘Protect and serve’ is a little different than ‘shoot ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.’”

“More of a challenge,” Jake says.

Cougar looks up at him with the skeptical eyebrow, the one that means, _I saw what you did there._

Jake looks back at him with the open hopeful expression, the one that he always tries to use for tricky situations. _Who, me? Would I do a thing like that? Look at this innocent face._

Cougar just shakes his head, goes back to spooning up oatmeal.

Jake taps the table. “What, are you hoping this town doesn’t need a SWAT team, so we can go back to a big city with decent restaurants and wifi access?”

The corner of Cougar’s mouth curls upward. “Are you?”

“Oh hell, I dunno. Chickens, man. On the other hand, best eggs I’ve had in years. You?”

Cougar grunts. “Huh. Volunteer sheriffs willing to tackle meth labs and get shot.”

“Maybe they get so bored anything sounds good?”

Cougar slants up another skeptical look at him. “Are you bored?”

“I think I’m afraid of getting bored,” Jake says, surprising himself with it. “I think Max’s minions are boring, and I don’t want to think about them for awhile. I think I’m in a bad habit of being bored whenever I’ve stayed with my sister for too long, so I’m all squinched-up expecting it to happen, but actually, right now? I’m not bored at all. I’m looking at you and I’m really happy to be here eating really great food you made, and just sitting here, as long as I want to, looking at you.”

Cougar looks up at him and smiles, all across his face. “Good.”

“Did you mean it about washing dishes and then-- I mean, last night--”

The smile turns wicked. “Yes.”

“Dishes are boring.”

“Not if you’re busy thinking about how you’re going to get to your happy place right where you just ate breakfast.”

Jake opens his mouth, lifts one finger to point, puts it back down on the table, and closes his mouth.

Cougar nods over his coffee cup. “Makes you think differently about lots of things when you get to make out on the kitchen table.” Then he leans his elbows on the table, props up the cup between his hands, and sips at it in a leisurely manner.

Jake feels his mouth is hanging open again. Closes it. “Aphorisms of the Cougster: Get laid on the dining room table, it makes you happy to do things in there.”

Cougar smiles again. “The couch is good too, after you just vaccuumed in there.”

“Somehow I don’t think you learned any of that from your mama.”

“No. It’s basic dog training. Do some work, get rewarded.”

“Not chicken coops.”

“No, that’s shower time.”

“After you clean the shower, right?”

“Well, if you’re not falling down exhausted.”

“What do you do if you are falling down?”

“Get laid on the floor, of course,” Cougar says.

Jake licks off his oatmeal spoon in a maliciously suggestive way at Cougar, who just laughs at him. Jake picks up his dishes, takes them to the sink. Without a word, Cougar holds out his stack of dirty dishes, and sips his coffee. Jake takes those dishes too, and starts running the tap to yield hot water. Gets out the soap, puts out a towel on the counter, and starts scrubbing things by hand. “We could put in a dishwasher,” Jake says.

“Mmm,” Cougar agrees, and tips up his coffee mug.

“Take some plumbing work under the floorboards, huh? Do you know how to do any of that stuff?”

“Mmhm,” Cougar replies. After a few moments Cougar is standing next to him, putting soap on a sponge, and he takes it over the stove and starts cleaning that up. Then he starts wiping down the cabinets on that side.

By then, the pans are done and Jake is toweling his hands dry. He sidles up behind Cougar and rests his chin on the man’s shoulder, and curls his arms around the man’s waist.

“Mmm,” Cougar says, leaning into the embrace.

“Thanks for breakfast,” Jake says, and kisses his ear.

“De nada,” Cougar says, and turns around and kisses Jake on the mouth for awhile. His mouth tastes of fresh coffee, which is kind of wonderful and odd. Jake waltzes them both over to the sink, takes the sponge out of Cougar’s hand, rinses the man’s hands under the tap, dries them off on the towel, and starts unbuttoning Cougar’s old, soft plaid shirt.

“Mmm?” Cougar asks, cooperating.

“I think I wanna suck your dick now. What do you think of that idea?”

Cougar chuckles, draws in a deep breath, and his stomach hollows out. He gives a wiggle, and his pants drop off his hips and fall onto his boots. “I like it.”

“I can see that. Neat trick.”

Cougar gives another twitch, tugs on a shirt tail, and the buttons on his shirt pop open comically in a line, bip-bip-bip. He pulls his arms out of the sleeves, drops the shirt. Then he backs up his fanny against the edge of the table, yanks down his briefs, steps out of his boots and leaves the whole wad of clothes on the floor as he spreads himself over the table. He’s wearing the hat, and his boot socks, and a nice red erection. He props his head up on one hand. “I’m not that quick on getting back into them again, sadly.” The other hand comes up with a couple of condom packets, which he must have had tucked in a pocket somewhere.

Jake starts to laugh. “God, where does the awesome stop, Slick?”

“Probably when you start making me too happy and I start getting silly.”

“Well, the advantage of this table,” Jake says, coming around the corner and running his hands over all that warm skin, “is you’re all laid out very handy for whatever I wanna kiss. It’s a good table for that.”

“I noticed that,” Cougar agrees, and he sets aside the hat.

Jake takes the condoms, puts one in his pocket and opens another. He grips the man’s dick--it is already leaking, so Cougar must have been thinking about this scenario for awhile there, just as much as Jake has been--and he starts unrolling the ring down the length of Cougar’s dick. He has to repeat that phrasing in his mind a couple of times: _I am unrolling a condom onto Cougar’s dick._ There’s _my hand,_ hanging onto Cougar’s _dick._ Really, there ought to be pictures. I am putting a condom _on Cougar’s dick,_ and he seems to be encouraging the whole thing.

“Not latex. It should taste a little better. Have you ever done this?”

“Nope. And really, why would I bother with anything but the best dick ever, for my first attempt?”

Cougar frowns a little. “It is not the best. It is willful and full of whims and silly ideas and it wants attention all the time. And it looks absurd.”

“Sounds like a dick to me,” Jake says, smoothing the ring down against the base of Cougar’s shaft. He strokes his fingertips against Cougar’s hair, and down onto his balls, and Cougar makes this tight little whine behind clenched teeth. Best sound _ever._ Jake leans down, puts his lips around the tip of his lover's dick, and listens for the whine to turn into a full-blown yelp. Braces for the man to start thrusting up against his molars, in case Cougar is losing it that fast.

Cougar doesn’t do any of that, but he does groan. He shudders in place, and groans.

“Mmmmmm?” Jake asks, trying to figure out how to work his jaws open wider, how to move his tongue around the width of it. He can push his tongue into the vein on the underside, but he doesn’t have much room for anything else. The condom is some odd berry flavored thing, and under that is the odd tang of rubber, and over everything else, not faint at all, is the musk of Cougar’s sexual odor, heavier yet along his balls. Jake tilts his head, smelling the man, and rubbing his tongue along the underside of Cougar’s dick.

Cougar shudders again, and little twitches and jerks move his dick along Jake’s tongue.

“Mmmmp,” Jake says, surprised. Yes, that’s Cougar orgasming, Cougar’s dick is shaking and twitching and the big vein is pulsing along the underside.

“Ahhhhh,” Cougar says, and his whole body slackens down, except his dick, which is still pretty hard. Jake pulls his mouth back, lays the dick down on Cougar’s thigh. Yes, it’s got a pocket of fluid in that condom, he’s definitely filled it up.

Cougar lays there sprawled on the table like he could happily stay that way all day long. The darned old boot socks and the matted fur on his belly and the tight rumpled skin on his balls ought to look ridiculous, but it’s harsh instead. Cougar looks thin and beat-up, someone whose bones are easily hurt, somebody Jake doesn’t want to push too hard.

That’s not a good attitude to take with one of the Losers, he knows that.

He remembers how Cougar worked on Jake’s feet for weeks there, massaging things as the scars healed up, making sure he was stretching the tendons, taking zero pity on him when things hurt, but also not allowing him to neglect things or to overdo and hurt himself. Cougar kept a sharp eye on Jake’s progress that whole time, and he still did, when they were doing PT.

Turns out Cougar knew what he was talking about. The morning light has no pity on Jake, showing an entire history he didn’t even know about in the dark. There’s marks all over the man. That scoremark across the really soft dark skin at the inner thigh joint runs way across his scrotum, where somebody _hurt_ Cougar and left a scar that puckers oddly. There’s the glancing white scoop left by a boar tusk on his shin, dings and cuts all down his legs, all kinds of scratches along his knuckles and forearms, some of them burn marks from his own guns. A ray of sunlight slants across his chest, emphasizing how fast he’s breathing, picking up the congested dark color of his nipples and the rosy flush along his pecs, reddening the big Sacred Heart tattoo across his chest until a couple of thin white scars show up.

Cougar puts up one hand, touches Jake on the arm. “Come here,” he murmurs, and kisses Jake on the cheek. _“Quiero, mi amante--”_

“You like being kissed, you like hugging and touching?” Jake asks, leaning in on him and brushing the man’s hair back out of his eyes.

“ _Pero no es--”_ Cougar shrugs a little.

“Macho?”

“ _Sí, no es de hombres.”_ Cougar slides one arm around Jake, turns his face into Jake’s chest, gives a big sigh.

“I don’t see where anybody’s got room to question _that,”_ Jake says. He’s ridiculously pleased that his lover still wants to be touched, that Cougar isn’t pulling away, overstimulated or disgusted or something. Jake leans in closer, hugging Cougar with one arm. “It’s good you like cuddling, because I’m a needy little geek boy and I might push my luck too far and--”

“No,” Cougar says. “You won’t be too much for me.”

“You’re sure?”

“There’s a hunger for skin you get when you stay alone too much,” Cougar says.

“Yeah?”

“You have a need, you do silly things if you can’t have it in a good way. And this is a good way. I need this too, Jake, please.”

Jake blinks, astonished.

Cougar rolls his head around and looks up at Jake. Then he puts two fingers over Jake’s mouth, and he says, _“Mi amante,”_ and traces those two fingers along Jake’s face, along his neck, up the back of his skull, down his jaw to his chin. “I’m not very good at making love.”

Jake props his hands down on the table on either side of Cougar’s shoulders. “Really.”

“I don’t have much practice at it,” Cougar says, and he means it.

“We could do that,” Jake says. He leans in and kisses the man. It is a long, careful, thoughtful kiss investigating what Cougar’s molars feel like, and Cougar cooperates with this completely. When Jake pulls back, Cougar’s lips are still open, his eyes shut.

“More?” Jake asks.

“ _Sí,_ ” Cougar says.

“You’re very demanding, _querido,”_ Jake says. “Don’t laugh, really, it was the word of the day!”

“Mmm,” Cougar agrees, with his shut eyes crinkling into a smile.

“If I wanted you to--” Jake begins, and brushes one hand along Cougar’s thigh.

“Mmmm?” Cougar says, and moves his knee aside, leaving himself wide open.

“You don’t have to,” Jake says, “you don’t, you really don’t,” and he strokes Cougar’s arms, and down onto his shoulders, and kisses him again, promising things wordlessly about what Cougar deserves from him. He’s a little frantic about it, worried, and he draws back with a harsh whistle of air.

“Easy,” Cougar murmurs, stroking the back of Jake’s head. “You know I will like it. You will make me very happy when you fuck me, there is no question. Do not worry.”

“I didn’t expect things to go this way round,” Jake says.

Cougar blinks at him. “I certainly will not be taking you until we know more about how your body works, if it will feel good for you. Until you know if I am careful.”

“I trust you--”

Cougar puts the two fingers over Jake’s mouth. “You don’t know yet.”

Jake opens his mouth, takes the two fingers in his lips, and starts sucking on them. Then he puts his hand down on Cougar’s thigh, feels his way along to the man’s balls, and starts stroking them.

Cougar’s eyes roll back in his head, he gasps, arches his back, and the condom on his dick comes off in Jake’s grip, leaving the shaft wet and hot in Jake’s hand. He knows what to do with that. It takes longer than the first time that morning, and Jake gets to try a few different approaches with it, and Cougar’s legs flail around a bit, finally hooking his ankles around Jake’s waist. Cougar’s fingers slide out of Jake’s mouth in the process and he clutches at Jake’s shoulder instead. He seems to really want Jake in close, leaning over him, and the noise he makes when he comes this time is pretty loud but nowhere near as long or as loud as he was during the night.

“I kind of like this, trying things that make you come,” Jake says.

“Eehhh,” Cougar says, breathing hard.

“How’s that? You feel like fixing a chicken coop now? Are you all happy and bouncy and full of energy?”

“Uuhhh,” Cougar says. “Gimme a minute.”

“Sure,” Jake says.

“You’re laughing.”

“I’m very happy right now, and not bored at all.”

“Good,” Cougar says.

Jake bounces in and kisses him, pressing him down against the table and patting Cougar’s chest. Then he pulls away, laughing. “I could do that again. A couple of times in a row even.”

“Uhhhhh.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll break me.”

“Gee, that would make me sad.”

Cougar pulls himself up slowly onto one elbow, gazes at Jake. “I was gonna suck you off,” he says.

“I know, it’s confusing, but I got you first. Neener neener neener. And you’ll have to get dressed to catch me now.” Jake dashes to the back door, unlocks it, darts outside, laughing like a fiend. Then he runs all around the house, chanting, “Neener neener neener!” and laughing. He sucked Cougar’s dick, and the dick liked it… He jacked off Cougar’s dick, and the dick liked it!

There’s probably a song about it somewhere. Jake has no idea why the whole thing makes him so ridiculously full of joy.

When he laps the second time past the back steps, Cougar is standing there on the porch, buttoning his shirt and stretching his shoulders and stamping his boots on more fully, and generally looking like he just woke up. “Mmmph,” Cougar says, squinting into the breeze. Then he looks at Jake with a bemused expression.

Jake is prancing around waving his arms in the air, yelling, “Winner! Winner!”

Cougar pushes a wad of wind-blown hair out of his eyes, tips his hat onto his head, holds up a metal tape measure, and says, “Laptop.”

“Right!” Jake says, and pivots smartly around him to run inside the house. Not fast enough to dodge the hard smack of Cougar’s palm on his ass, though. He gives a yelp.

“Bring a folding chair, too,” Cougar says.

“How about a couple of ‘em?” Jake shouts back at him.

“Mmm,” Cougar agrees.

When Jake returns, laptop carry case strap on one shoulder and a chair under either arm, Cougar is strolling away through the yard, hands in his pockets, sniffing the breeze. There’s a distinct swagger to his gait, as if he’s feeling quite well, life is good, and he is very satisfied with himself and the world, thank you.

Jake hasn’t seen that very often. It’s fun to know he’s caused some of it, and he might cause some more. When he comes up level with Cougar, panting a little with the awkward chairs, Cougar turns and smiles at him under the hat brim.

“You ran away before I got to suck you off too,” Cougar says.

“Oh, I thought you wouldn’t feel like it if you got all finished off--”

Cougar gives him a disbelieving look. “No.”

“No?”

“What makes you think I would ever give up a chance at your sex in my _mouth?”_

Jake says, “Uuhhh.”

Cougar turns away, gives him the down-turned hat brim.

“Uh, I just-- “ Jake struggles with the stuff he’s carrying.

“I will say if I don’t want to,” Cougar says, standing there all prickly and stiff, on his dignity.

“Okay,” Jake says.

“And you can say, ‘No don’t,’ if you don’t want me to.”

“Like that’s ever going to happen!” Jake splutters.

Cougar aims the lifted eyebrow at him, but hey, that’s better than the hatbrim going down.

Jake says, “Hey, it’s kind of embarrassing how much I want you, okay? I just--I’m not handling some of it too well, I’m sorry, I just-- fuck, Cougs, I just look at you and I’m all up and messing in my pants.” Which is certainly true. There’s a wet spot to prove it.

The stern look doesn’t ease up. Cougar just nods, finally, and puts up his hand and pats Jake on the arm. Then Cougar takes the chairs from him, opens them up, sets them down right there in the yard. He takes the laptop strap off Jake’s shoulder, and leans the case up against a chair leg. Then he sits down on the other chair, propping up one dusty boot over the other knee. The breeze swirls around them. “Look,” Cougar says, nodding at the yard. Maybe at the line of windbreak trees, or the slope down toward the more distant river, or the low rounded hills rolling beyond that. There’s some young Brahma-cross steers grazing in a distant field, and some Holsteins with calves in another one. Seems like an odd time for calves, and an odd place to bring in a breed with tropical history, but who is Jake to argue with the locals?

Jake resettles his own chair on the lumpy grass. “Yeah?”

“What is different from last time?”

“Well, the cows,” Jake says.

Cougar tilts the hat brim, and waits.

“Some new fences, those squeeze chutes, uhh, there by that clump of scrubby trees--some kind of hickory, I don’t know what kind, messy as hell, the squirrels like to throw junk down at you--”

“Ahh, maybe shagbark, then.” Cougar’s mouth makes frowny shapes. “Huh, looks a little dry there. Must like the slop from the watering troughs. If it is, the nuts are edible, just hard to crack. Pigs like ‘em. Folks used to make the wood into tool handles and bows and canes. Like, canes for whipping people.” Cougar makes a face. Then he looks at Jake. “Might be some good y-shaped branches down in the litter, I could make some new slingshots.”

“Huh. And here I just thought it was only good for smoking hams or shit.”

He smiles at Jake. “There’s a hickory syrup too, like maple syrup but it’s kind of bitter and smoky.”

“Kind of like you,” Jake says.

Cougar tilts the hatbrim in amiable agreement. “An acquired taste.”

“Oh _yeah,”_ Jake says.

“What else?”

“Well, that east road over there, and the houses along there. It’s been awhile, you know.”

“Uh huh. Who owns the car sitting down there at the bottom of that last driveway?”

“No idea.”

Cougar gets up from the chair, folds it, lifts it, and starts walking away. “We’ll figure out the address there, in case it’s the house owner. I’ll give you the plate number, you might want to check the registration. The driver is using binoculars, badly.”

Jake snatches up his laptop, puts the strap on his shoulder, folds up his chair, and chases after Cougar. “If he was going to shoot us, he had the drop when we came out of the house, right?”

Cougar nods.

“Was he there when you first got up?”

Another nod.

“Well, shit. Think it’s one of Coulson’s SHIELD folks?”

Cougar shrugs. “I sent a message on my phone to Coulson. No response.”

“So now we’re gonna work on the chicken coop like we didn’t see him sitting there,” Jake says.

“Sí,” Cougar says. He stops at the fence, opens the improvised gate for Jake, and closes it again. Chickens come running up at them, squawking for scraps maybe, and run away again.

“Or like we know he’s there and we can’t horse around or kiss or anything,” Jake says.

Cougar opens up his chair, takes Jake’s laptop strap, puts it down on the seat. Then he takes the chair from Jake, opens it up, and settles the feet into the loose dirt. He puts up his hand and tugs on Jake’s shoulder, and Jake sits down. Cougar puts the laptop in his hands, ruffles Jake’s hair, and walks away, saying, “Like we’re in public, and if we decide it’s a good time to horse around and kiss and be disgustingly cute, we can do that. We haven’t talked about how out and proud we want to take it in your sister’s town.”

“Yeah,” Jake says.

“If Mister Binoculars has decent camera gear, he saw us already through the windows. But I doubt it, the way he is flashing those lenses around. Amateurs.”

Jake tilts the laptop so the screen is visible in spite of the sunlight glare in the chicken pen, and he starts setting up a new spreadsheet for chicken pen measurements. “Using the world’s most advanced mass-market computer architecture and an open-source graphics program that would make a lot of oldtime CADCAM designers weep, now I am going--yes, drumroll please--” he drums his fingers on the case, “--to draw a chicken yard.”

Cougar chuckles.

Jake adds hastily, “And compose a materials list for the hardware store.”

“Eight feet,” Cougar says, unhooking the metal tip of the tape measure from the first pole. He walks around to the next one, letting the tape stretch out behind him. “Six feet.”

“We could make it bigger,” Jake says.

“Better to reinforce the poles already here, and make a chicken tractor. It’s a little pen you move around every few hours, so the birds forage in new places, eat more bugs.”

“Jen used to have a veggie garden before she went back to work, but she hasn’t had time lately. The chickens loved it.”

“I saw that, where the grass grew back. We could dig it over, or start in a new place. Do you want to start digging up a garden for winter things? It’d be the right time for that.”

“Cougs, is there anything you don’t know how to do?”

“Computer things, lots,” Cougar says, and he stoops to hook a piece of wire back over a crooked nail and close up the hole temporarily. “Everything I know is old.”

“Except the gay stuff,” Jake says.

Cougar flashes him a look. “That’s older than anything else.”

Jake lifts his eyebrows back at Cougar.

“Truly, it is.”

“Oh yeah, like the Greeks and stuff, the Spartans, all that?” Jake nods.

“It’s just not a history they want anybody to teach, in places like this. Not even the newer stuff, about how to not die of nasty new STDs. Or the old standards, either.”

“Would you rather go back home, or settle down in Mexico, or something?”

“No. Not with _mis padres_ , no. Border towns, no. Mexico City, Cancun, tourist drags anywhere on the beach, no, expensive, unless you like cardboard shacks. I think you would not be happy further south in the heat, like those ex-pats who live in the Caribbean and Panama and so on. And small towns in Tlaxcala, where my father’s family came from, that’s worse on small town problems. Maricónes are always getting beat up and killed and nobody wants to see them in a medical clinic--” he shakes his head. “Also, going to live in France, with _mis hermanas?_ Very expensive. Prove you have a patron, a job to go to, lots of letters of recommendation. Which, yes, we could ask for help with Tony Stark’s organization, but I think this would give work that is much better for you than me. How could I become a gendarme when I speak only small bits of French?”

Jake nods. “Well, maybe there’s some kind of specialized Spanish- and English-speaking police liaison type work where you’d get a perfect fit, and you could learn more French in, like maybe six, ten weeks, right? Keeping an open mind here.”

Cougar smiles under the hat brim. “Never give up.”

“Nevaaaiiir!” Jake says, pumping his fist in the air. “Pirates nevaair give up! Arrrrr, mateys-- okay, gimme the next side.”

“I should have got a hammer,” Cougar says, frowning again.

“I distracted you.”

“You did.” Cougar turns away with his tape measure, but he’s smiling under the hat.

“It’s only fair,” Jake says. “You’re always distracting me.”

Cougar gives a little shimmy with his hips, waggling--yes, really, Cougar is waggling his _butt,_ and then he grins back over his shoulder.

“You’re a tease!”

“Oh, only now you are noticing?” Cougar says, and gives a little pout with his lips.

“Okay, okay, which of your sisters were dancers in Vegas before they went to France? You really need a feather headdress and a glitter thong if you’re going to wiggle like that. Or maybe a coin belt and braids and shit to fling around, if you’re gonna go all bellydance on me here. And damn, you’d make a fine bellydancer.”

Cougar shrugs again. “Many tango dancers also learn other dances. Pole-dancing, anything, if they have to.”

“When did you learn that?”

Cougar smiles again. “When I was thirteen, going hungry.”

Jake stares over the laptop.

“My cousins were nice about it when they caught their older sons fucking me on the couch. Maybe just as well--I liked it but they were getting rough. So my cousins took us all in to a free clinic to get checked for STDs, and then they told me they couldn’t afford to keep feeding me. They gave me bus fare home and told me to make the best of it until I was old enough to leave school and find a job. Mi mama cried when I came home, or mi papa wouldn’t have let me stay. Lucky, compared to some.” He shrugs again. “The bullying in school was bad enough, not just on me but on a whole bunch of us, that I broke one guy’s jaw with my slingshot and decided it was time to visit the recruiter and quick, get out of town. Like Roque. Do something useful with all that mad. I haven’t been sorry.”

Jake stands up, puts the laptop down on his chair seat, and holds out one arm.

Cougar just looks at him. “Pathos is not attractive.”

“Oh, the hell it isn’t,” Jake says, rather shakily. “Would you mind? I just-- please, I want to hug you. Humor me, it’d make _me_ feel better.”

“I did not say it to make you feel bad.”

“You know, when you drop the hammer telling people things, you don’t fool around.”

“No, of course not,” Cougar says, sounding puzzled, but he puts the measuring tape in his pocket and walks over the loose sand, and he walks right into Jake’s hug. He pats Jake on the back. “I am still going to suck your dick on the kitchen table.”

Jake gives a shaky laugh. “Okay, okay, it’s a date, I promise.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Younger guys might be annoyed with Cougar's absolute insistence on safe sex, but he's too much of a medic to let them be careless. He's protecting them from his own promiscuity. Cougar isn't old enough to have survived the first horrific wave of AIDS deaths, but I think he was lucky enough to learn the history, and how to have safe sex, from people who did see friends die of it. These would be people who have never forgotten the bitterness of a government ignoring a preventable epidemic for far too long. Cougar will also be angrily aware that the gay Hispanic community was, and is, ravaged by STDs spread by ignorance and lack of courage to educate.  
> You can find fantasy bareback sex in a lot of stories, nothing wrong with fantasies.  
> However, writing safe sane consensual blistering hot (and often very funny) sex is still a frontier that could use more writers, in my humble opinion. If you can't laugh freely in bed with someone you like a lot, where else can you laugh at all?


	10. Bésame mucho

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> YouTube really does have a lot to answer for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by on fic_promptly offering a day of music prompts, in particular the prompt from jujitsuelf,  
> "Any fandom, any characters, Argentine Tango"
> 
> That's here:
> 
> http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/204653.html?thread=8646509#cmt8646509
> 
> But could also be loosely associated to this one:
> 
> http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/204653.html?thread=8646765#cmt8646765
> 
> Translation notes at the end. Since I impatiently used Google translate instead of waiting to ask a Spanish-speaking beta-reader, some idioms may not be correct, feel free to comment and allow me to edit to correct them.

It’s a man’s voice singing, surprisingly deep, a little raspy. Abrupt on some of the words, not on others. Extended sometimes into whiskey-voiced vowels, sinuous and muscular as a python, with wind enough to keep powering on effortlessly as long as he chooses to.

_"Bésame, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez_

_"Bésame mucho, que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez…”_

Jake blinks open his eyes, rubs his face in his hands. Who fucking sings like that at five am, somebody who’s been partying all night long? The voice certainly sounds like it.

_"Quiero tenerte muy cerca, mirarme en tus ojos, verte junto a mí_

_"Piensa que tal vez mañana yo ya estaré lejos, muy lejos de aquí…”_

Jake’s morning wood twitches, wide awake. Oh yeah, it likes that voice. Liiiiikes it. Dropped syllables, humming sometimes, flatting off a hair wrong sometimes on the high notes, that just makes it a real person, right there in the kitchen, playing with that little echo you get off the high ceiling in there. A real person with a scruffy beard and a messy ponytail-- no, not even that, no, he’s probably left his hair down to dry out after he got his shower, little damp tips still curling down his back and getting in his eyes while he’s chopping peppers and onions, singing.

_"Oohhhhhhh, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez_

_"Bésame mucho, que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez…”_

_Thump, thump thump_ on the cutting board _,_ then the water running, washing things. A hiss of something searing in a hot pan.

Jake stares up at the bedroom ceiling. Dim light spills from the bathroom into the hall, slants upward. A shaft of pale yellow marks out cracks in the plaster and rather more spiderwebs than a decent housekeeper would permit.

 _Jake, boy_ , he tells himself, _you have got it bad._

It’s not like he’s never had crushes--especially the serious, life-threatening, deadly dangerous impossible crushes. But three days of the agony, usually, especially among the dorks and scrubs and slimeballs and lying bastards he endured on all his other teams, and the scales had fallen from his love-blinded eyes. No, after that he was permanently disillusioned and totally immune to any further displays of their charms. Bleargh. Total turn-off.

Cougar’s powers over him do not seem to be waning. They seem to be increasing. This is baffling. He _knows_ Cougar. He’s watched Cougar do _belching contests_ with Pooch, he’s watched Cougar get all gruff and embarrassed when people he’s _rescued_ tried to thank him for his service. He’s a total pussycat about wanting warm naps.

Cougar is… totally solid and incredibly fast and brutally simple and cheats on cards like a mofo. He’s also crazy. He has been for years literally certified as crazy, worthy of the special place where they keep the jackets with the buckles, except Clay and the other Losers have fought so hard to keep him teetering this side of functional and off the mind-control drugs.

He has solemnly assured Jake, taking breaks while sucking Jake’s dick, that Jake is crazy to take the risk of getting involved with him, but he’s pretty sure he won’t hurt Jake during a flashback. He hasn’t so far, and he’s had some doozies when they got back from bad shit out in the field.

Singing. That’s new. Jake doesn’t think he’s ever heard Cougar sing, except once six months ago when he was drunk off his ass, and that was right after his mother finally admitted his father had some heart attacks and nobody told Cougar the man had been hospitalized for a month already. Clay and Roque both asked Cougar if he needed to fly home to see his folks, and he just shook his head.

Then he went out and bought eight six-packs of cheap beer and he sat on the floor watching kid’s cartoons while he drank his way through it. Anybody would get weird under those circumstances, and singing Sesame Street while watching cartoons is far less weird than the shit Jake does on a daily basis. Jake sat down with him sometimes, chattered at him through the more alarmingly distorted parts of Rin & Stimpy that were frightening him-- and how pathetic is it that Cougar couldn’t even punch out the TV to stop it being wrong for little kids?

Jake reminds himself firmly, _never ever watch those things when stoned out of your gourd._

Jake just kept giving Cougar chocolate until he finally put some in his mouth, and that broke the whole not-eating-for-days thing. Then Cougar was ravenous and he ate every piece of candy in the house, including Jake’s stash taped under the bottom drawer of the dresser, and then he was comprehensively and violently sick all over the bathroom. And then he went to bed and slept for three days.

Guess who got to clean it up? And guess what Clay said about it?

"Outstanding. I was beginning to worry he’d go out and get another shitload of six packs. Or a keg.”

"Don’t give him any cute ideas,” Roque said.

"You got any reports on his dad’s prognosis yet?” Clay asked Jake, as if poking around in HIPAA hospital records were just everyday hacks he pulled off for shits and giggles when he was bored. Which, yes, he might just have figured out some useful stuff there.

Clay had nodded. “Good, I’ll leave it to your discretion to tell him what you’ve got on his dad’s condition when he wakes up. See how he is. If you think he’s not ready for it, if you’d rather, you can leave it with Roque or with me, and we’ll tell him when we think it’s appropriate.”

Which yeah, is a vote of confidence he hadn’t expected, having Clay trust him with a hammer standing right over the crazy cracks in Cougar’s ornately decorated Easter Egg of a brain. God _Almighty,_ all the crazy shit that Cougar knows.

But then, Jake’s been there anyway, knowing the whole time if he bumped Cougar too hard by accident, the man might come all to pieces right there in his hands.

He’s had the same sensation with Roque sometimes. And Clay.

Come to think, if you get careless when you talk about Pooch’s gal Jolene, or if you just pick the wrong moment even, you’ll have Pooch coming right over the table at you and ruin the pizza too, so none of them are exactly plum level sane.

It takes him a moment to recognize the voice has switched into English. Jake’s dick actually jerks, it’s throbbing so hard.

“ _If you should leave me each little dream would take wing and my life would be through…”_

Jake pulls back the covers so his leaking frantic dick won’t make a mess so big that he’ll have to change the sheets and Cougar will know it, and he’ll know why, and he might tease Jake about it, and start a tickle-fight, and… hopeless. He might as well get up and hit the bathroom and deal with life at five am, even if he yawns all day long. He’s just reached the hall when he takes in a deep lungful of cooking smells.

Bacon.

The man is cooking bacon.

Jake can smell it.

This is the really good stuff, the local hickory-smoked expensive stuff that Cougar insisted they must try from the butcher that Lucille the chocolatier recommended.

Oh _man,_ this is some kind of hoodoo-magic bacon.

He’s also reviewing his painful, awful embarrassment from last evening. He has been known to wear girlie pink tee shirts without shame, why does this feel so crucifyingly awful? Jake was actually considering asking Cougar to teach him how to tango. And it still seems like a wonderful idea. Like, ask Cougar to practice with him, teaching him the steps, right there in the kitchen, _this morning._ Because he wants to touch Cougar in all kinds of impractical ways, and somehow, for his own dignity, he wants an excuse to cover his want. Okay, not just horniness, his flatout panicky _neediness._ Plus, maybe it’ll let him move enough to keep calm, to let him get through the twitches and the jumpiness.

Jake grimaces, still feeling remembered embarrassment. Cougar had caught him frowning at his laptop, between jabs at data feeds, watching YouTube instruction on tango dancing basics. Cougar’s eyes crinkled with amusement, but he didn’t smile. He just reached in, typed in a search term, pointed which video to start with.

“They’re pretty good teachers,” he said, and went off again to do something else in the kitchen.

 _Why is he cleaning the fridge?_ Jake had thought, distracted.

In an hour, Cougar returned and typed in another search term. “This couple does ballroom instruction, they’re funny too.”

Cougar just kept doing that for a good chunk of the night, until Jake gave up on working and shut the laptop. When Jake had dragged into the kitchen, yawning, he found things gleaming, dishes put away, the rugs and curtains freshly laundered, the window sash and the screen fixed, and a cardboard box warning placed over the spot where Cougar glued the linoleum back down. Apparently Cougar has to move to deal with twitches and jitters too.

The insidious singing voice makes Jake want to go down on his knees and beg for anything it cares to give him. It makes him want to rub his dick in the sheets and come so hard he sees stars floating across his eyeballs. This is not a voice that he did anything to deserve, waking him up at five am with his balls tight as drums.

“ _Bésame mucho, love me forever and make all my dreams come true_

_"Que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez…”_

Jake fumbles his way through his most basic bathroom routine, puts on some pants, a tee shirt. Now he smells coffee, too. He shuffles into the kitchen holding his glasses in one hand.

 _"Bésame mucho,”_ the voice sings, and hard, calloused hands take the glasses from him and settle them on his face, and smooth the hair back over his ears

“What does that even mean?” Jake says, blinking at the coffee cup warming his right hand.

“Kiss me a lot,” Cougar says, and pats his back sympathetically, and goes back to the stove.

“Cougs?”

“Mmmm?” he replies, taking the sound up and down the melody line of the song.

“How do you work out a gay tango?”

“Mmmhmmm,” Cougar murmurs on with the melody. “With a good partner.”

"But not just with one guy doing the lady’s part, right? I saw that on the gay tango videos.”

“Oh, you found those too?”

“They look terrifying,” Jake says.

“Why?” Cougar asks, coming up to him, peering into his face with that intent feline gaze of his.

“Lots of...flying heel kick things, lots of surprises, massive technique, all that footwork.”

“Mmmmmhmmm, to impress people,” Cougar says.

“What happens if you don’t try to?”

“Ahh, that looks like this,” Cougar says, and takes the mug out of his hand, and takes Jake’s hands, places one firmly on his own shoulder. “You remember how to collect yourself, pull the breast and the upper back muscles in toward the spine? You have it. Long front line. Yes, Spec Ops training is good for something. Now step back. To your right. Now forward. Come with me again. Pull the muscles in tighter on your left side as we step around--good.”

“This song isn’t a tango, is it?”

“No. It can be a cha-cha or a rhumba. Many partner dynamics work the same.”

“I read some stuff, they were saying the history of Argentine tango development was that men practiced it together outside brothels while they were waiting their turn for business. I assume some of the men went to dance practice and never bothered to go inside to meet the ladies?”

Cougar hums, taking them up and down five steps in the limited room in the kitchen. “We do like to assume many things like this in our own favor.” He drifts to a stop. “Eggs.”

Jake lets go, reluctantly. He was right about the man’s hair, dammit.

“You realize, this song I have stuck in my head is such a stupid sentimental piece of schmaltz,” Cougar says then, turning his back to Jake. He flips the gas back on and scrapes chopped vegetables into the hot skillet that he’d mostly drained of bacon grease. “The kind of song where sad old lounge bands use congas and tell old ladies to make an effort-- Dean Martin sang it--”

Jake steps in behind the cook, snorting, and leans in to say into Cougar’s ear,”I don’t care if it is,” and kisses him on the temple. Then he starts singing, “ _“Bésame mucho…mmmhmhmhmm…”_ and puts his hands on Cougar’s hips. He’s quite mad about those, when he gets to touch them. So narrow and elegant.

“Stay with me here while I cook, it’s good practice,” Cougar says, pressing Jake’s hands back in place when he would have released Cougar to move more freely.

“I assume you won Latin dance competitions when you bothered to enter them?”

“I had a respectable paso doble, but the jitterbug, the cha cha, I always felt ridiculous,” Cougar says. “Undignified. So stiff in the neck. Ehhh, I was young, touchy about my dignity. Now I’m a broken down old fart I don’t care, I can just have fun, clown with it if I want. The way you dance with with your niece Beth, to make her laugh.”

Jake leans into the curly hair, kisses his ear, rests his chin on Cougar’s shoulder. “Some people learn that sooner than others, that’s all.”

“Your head is quite heavy,” Cougar says, making no effort to escape.

“Like you didn’t know it was full of rocks?” Jake says.

“It is at least half full of butterflies and girl’s soccer scores and Star Trek,” Cougar says, making a fluttering silly gesture with his fingers. “And mine is full of complete nonsense, so I have no right to complain either.”

“What kind of nonsense?” Jake asks.

Cougar puts down the spatula, turns around, pushes Jake back with two quick steps into a cabinet, and leans in close. His eyes are two black, black circles. “I want to kiss you in the kitchen over the frying onions. _Ridiculo.”_

“Totally,” Jake says. He nods solemnly. “I think you’ll have to persuade me you don’t indulge in sentiments like that. It might go to my head. I didn’t say which one--”

The crash of teeth is extremely satisfying. Cougar is fucking heavy muscle and bone when he wants to exert some persuasive force. He gives an indescribable ripple of his entire body up against Jake’s, with an extra smack of the hips against Jake’s pelvis, and laughs a completely evil laugh at the noise he gets out of Jake. The imprint of his dick, hard and happy through his jeans, is absolutely burning clear against the inside of Jake’s left thigh. And then he pulls away and nods once, and gives Jake a soft demure little kiss on the cheek, and he walks away to his pan on the stove.

“Uhhh,” Jake says, pained.

“That,” Cougar says, turning his head so it flings back his mane of hair, “is nearly everything you need to understand tango.” He frowns at the spatula in his hand. “Maybe not Finnish tango, which is very depressed, _mal dolor._ The songs are all about the freezing rain and the gray countryside.”

“That,” Jake says, gulping in some air, “is probably after you’ve got mad at me and kicked me in the head and burned down the place and wrecked the car. And you probably took the cat with you, but left the kids in diapers and the dog crying.”

Cougar nods. “Ahh, so you do get the Finnish style.”

“Never leave the cat behind.”

Cougar turns off the burner, scoops eggs and vegetables out of the skillet onto plates. No omelets today. He was too impatient, just mixed all of it together into scramble. “Why?”

“Because the cat is the only smart one in the place. The cat will come up and tell you what it wants, when it wants it. Like, loud and clear.” Jake pulls out utensils from the drawer, puts them on the table.

“That’s because you listen.”

“Huh. My sister complains that _guys never listen._ I mean, like, she says I never remember what she says.”

“Because she tries to talk to you about difficult things, things where you are being silly,” Cougar says, putting bacon on the plates, not looking at Jake.

“Oh, like what?”

“Oh, like leaving the Service, or coming out to the Losers, or--”

“Or you,” Jake says quietly. He holds out his hands to take the plates.

“Oh no, Jennifer said you listened very carefully to what she told you to do about me,” Cougar says, maddeningly cool. “And then you did the opposite. Or so she said.”

Jake stares at him. Cougar gives him the plates, pivots around him and leans in again. This time he kisses Jake on the jaw. “Whatever it was, it worked,” Cougar says, and puts up his hand to the back of Jake’s head, and strokes the stiff bristles of hair. “You already know how to tango just fine. The rest is just details of technique. As you say, footwork.”

“Practice,” Jake says, rigid in place.

“Mmm,” Cougar agrees. He tilts his head slightly, looking at Jake. Looking at Jake’s face, and smiling when Jake fumbles at putting the plates on the table finally.

Jake turns, leans back into the table edge, loops a long arm out around Cougar’s shoulders, draws in his back muscles so his body arches back and his weight shifts subtly, not tugging with his arm muscles at all. And magically Cougar comes with it, stepping forward into his embrace, sliding hands down around Jake’s waist. “Like that, exactly,” Cougar says, pleased.

Jake looks at the angular face of his lover, who was singing a song he derided as sentimental over the bacon he cooked for Jake.

 _"Bésame mucho,”_ Jake says, and it doesn’t come out smooth at all. It sounds harsh, gargled somewhere down in his chest.

Cougar says, _"Sí, como si fuera esta noche la última vez,”_ and then he does. He slides his arms around Jake’s ribs and tightens his arm muscles like a python and he pushes up on his toes high enough to reach Jake’s mouth and he kisses Jake silly. Absolutely silly. Not quite until the eggs get cold, but definitely on the cooler side than Cougar usually prefers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:
> 
> There’s many differing version of the basic song.
> 
> This is from the Connie Francis recording, there’s a simpler one from Dean Martin.
> 
>  
> 
> Bésame, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez
> 
> Bésame mucho, que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez
> 
>  
> 
> Quiero tenerte muy cerca, mirarme en tus ojos, verte junto a mí
> 
> Piensa que tal vez mañana yo ya estaré lejos, muy lejos de aquí
> 
>  
> 
> Oh, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez
> 
> Bésame mucho, que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez
> 
>  
> 
> If you should leave me each little dream would take wing and my life would be through
> 
> Bésame mucho, love me forever and make all my dreams come true
> 
> Que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte otra vez
> 
>  
> 
> Google translation version from that Spanish:
> 
>  
> 
> Kiss me, kiss me a lot, as if tonight were the last time
> 
> Besame Mucho, which I have fear to lose you, lose you again
> 
>  
> 
> I want you very close, look in your eyes, see you next to me
> 
> Think that perhaps tomorrow I already will be far, far away from here
> 
>  
> 
> Oh, kiss me a lot, as if tonight were the last time
> 
> Besame Mucho, which I have fear to lose you, lose you again
> 
>  
> 
> If You Should Leave Me each little dream would take wing and my life would be through
> 
> Bésame mucho, love me forever and make all my dreams come true
> 
> That I have fear to lose, lose you again


	11. Too Many Exes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One big problem with being so extremely bad ass is the fallout afterward. There's other drawbacks, but that's enough to be going on with, for now. Especially in a small community.

“Right, we got a pretty good selection here, for all your basic theobromine needs--’” Jake says, dipping his hand into the bag, and pulling out a sample in a crimped butter-yellow paper. He holds it out as if he’s going to play keep-away with it, grinning. “They’re from Oregon, I guess they learned this whole artisanal chocolate thing from businesses out there. They don’t have rainbow flags hanging from the rafters, but they might as well.”

Cougar leans on the steering wheel and gazes at Jake over the prop of his wrists. He just stares, not blinking. Not grabbing at all.

“All, c’mon, don’t you wanna try it? This one’s chili and sea salt--”

Cougar just licks his lips and opens his mouth and puts out his tongue in a shelf shape, and waits.

“OhMahGerd, Cougs, you mean cruel smex monster, you--”

The man’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, but he just waits, mouth open.

“Okay, okay, anybody else that’d be totally gross--” Jake grips the chocolate, placing it on the waiting tongue, and he’s not entirely surprised that the tongue tip flicks up and licks his fingers _around_ the little cube-shape. Slides along the forefinger, even. “You have the bad habits of a donkey,” Jake says sternly.

“Mmm,” Cougar says, now holding the chocolate between his front teeth, and licking at the back of it, still looking at Jake. “Mmm.”

“Good, huh?”

“Mmmm.” Cougar closes his mouth, apparently rolling it around in there and thinking about it.

“Tony got you totally spoiled, you brat.”

“Mmmm,” Cougar gives a lift of one shoulder, a baby shrug in his repertoire.

“But do you like it?”

The corners of Cougar’s mouth quirk upward.

“You blackmailing awful man,” Jake says, and fishes out another sample, pops it into Cougar’s mouth. “I’ll let you guess on that one.”

Cougar blinks at him. “Floral,” he says.

“Yeah, lavender,” Jake says.

“Mmm?”

“Yeah, you can cook with it,” Jake says.

Cougar tilts the hat, cocks up an eyebrow that means, _I didn’t know that,_ and glances past Jake out the window at something.

“You still watching that guy in the car?”

He gives the slightest dip of his head, a flick of the eyes toward the passenger rear view mirror under the hat brim.

“Did he ever go in the grocery store?”

“Mmm.”

“How much did he buy? Three bags and a jug of juice? His ice cream’s gonna melt on him, at this rate.”

Cougar glances down at the chocolatier’s bag in Jake’s hand, and smiles: _He’s waiting on us. And we’re dawdling over chocolates._ Really, who needs to say the words?

Jake sighs. “Cowboy Bob, what am I gonna do with you?”

The eyebrow goes up while Cougar thinks about what he’s going to do with Jake.

“Yeah, yeah, take it as read,” Jake says, waving his free hand over the chocolate bag, and finally he plucks out an upscale version of a gummi worm. He puts the end in his own mouth and slurps it up like a string of pasta, but very slowly and rudely, with many sound effects and extensive licking of the product.

Cougar just looks at him tolerantly, with that crinkle of amusement at the corners of his eyes. _You’re so flaming._

Jake sniffs at him, rolls the bag shut, sets it aside, and pulls out his laptop. He says, “Well, no results yet on the guy’s plate number. But we have some other fun stuff dribbling in.” A few rapid scans of text, and he frowns. "Do you by any chance have brothers named Jaguar and Panther?"

"No. _Mi hermano es Leon._ He has a friend everybody calls Jaguarundi, because he is like a little jaguar, he has freckles and he screams and bites people in fights. _Una de mis hermanas,_ she had a Paris catwalk name of Pantera for awhile." He reaches in on Jensen's laptop, types in a careful search phrase.

Jensen squawks. "OhEmGeeee, Cougs! This sister looks like she could kill you with an eyelash!"

"She used her little finger once. Three kidnappers.” He frowns. “Attempted kidnapping. But she was wearing metal lace nail covers.”

Jake peers up at him. "You're not even _joking."_ He looks down at the runway picture of a severe woman in thigh-high boots, black toreador hat, tight leather pants, and a leather mystery that might be a bolero jacket, a corset, a tac vest, or some chimera of all of them. And yes, the garment looks like it deserves to be loaded down with really classy ammo and butterfly knives and obscure ninja toys. The image doesn't look like Cougar in drag at all. It looks like a universe in which Cougar decided to go transgender with martial arts, up close and personal, instead of distance shooting. In ghetto parlance, she’s thick compared to the general style of runway models now. It’s bringing back memories of old, peeling posters of 80’s superstars. Oh, like that famous one of a muscular Farrah Fawcett in her swimsuit, head tilted.

Jake makes a gesture out of wiping off his chin. "Okaaaay, let's just save that little jpg, we'll see what else is on the web under her name later, yes, later, My Preshusss, when we're all alone with the pirate hat... What? TMI, huh?"

Cougar makes a face. "She's my _older sister._ She collects katanas the way Roque collects knives. And mascara. Oh, and cat purses."

"Cat purses."

"Purses shaped like cat heads, with cat prints, with fake cheetah and tiger markings," Cougar shrugs. "Also, she knows every pressure point on earth, and she's very fast to use them."

"Oh ho, so she can make life not worth living, huh? I diagnose a kid who pissed off his oldest sister a few too many times."

"Do not ever touch the purse with a cat on it."

Jake points his forefinger at Cougar. "Got it. I mean, I might implode if I'm in the same room with both of you, but no touching the purse. Got it."

Cougar frowns a little. “Now I think it was because she had guns in them. Nosy kid brother, _smack!_ no touching.”

Jake blinks up at him over his glasses. “Guns. As in, plural.”

“Always.” Cougar smiles. "She's a bodyguard for one of the favorite wives of a Saudi sheik. She taught me some of her Krav Maga, she's a trainer. She got me started on technical shooting."

"Hey--wait a minute-- culture shock here. She's a Mexican-American girl who works for the Saudis and she teaches an Israeli system of self-defense?"

Cougar shrugs. "She teaches a couple of other systems too. Her wife is from Jordan, she's a translator and history professor."

Jake can feel his eyes glaze over. "Your oldest sister is lesbian and likes brainy people?"

Cougar shrugs. "We all do. Well, most of us. Except Leon. Which is why his buddies end up in fights."

Jake adjusts his glasses on his nose, frowning. "And Leon's friend Jagarundi bites people?"

Another shrug. "He gets in a tight enough spot, he panics. Not bodyguard material.”

Jake is still looking at him doubtfully over the round blue lenses of his glasses. “And then there’s you, with the cat nickname.”

“Oh, not just me. They started calling one of Leon's other friends Cheetah because he's sloppy in card games. They started calling one of the French-signing tutor boyfriends Sylvester, after the cartoon tomcat who stalks Tweety Bird. Then my second oldest sister decided she had to have a nickname too, something fancy, and she wouldn't respond unless you called her Ocelot."

Jake squints at him. "You're doing that straight-faced laughing thing again, aren't you?"

"It sounds pretty stupid when you yell it in a mall food court."

"At least Cougar is a name you can holler down the hospital corridor, huh?"

Cougar rolls his eyes. But he keeps talking, a shock by itself. He says, "Somebody told my youngest sister she looked cute in fake animal prints and now she won't wear it unless it's all tiger print everything, so they call her--"

"Tigger?"

"No, Pooh. Because Tigger would be too obvious."

"Too many cats, man." Jakes nods solemnly.

With no warning at all, Cougar smiles and reaches out and ruffles Jake’s hair, grabs his neck, and kisses him on the cheek. “Cute.”

Jake makes surprised noises, hands in the air over his laptop. “You’re totally outing us, Cougs, you know that, right?”

“Nobody’s watching except the creepster,” Cougar says.

“You know who he is, don’t you?”

Cougar shrugs again, tilts the hat brim down, twists the key in the ignition of Jennifer’s ratty car. She left it for them with a note on the keyring, including a drawing of a cat in a cowboy hat by Beth. Cougar has already run the car impatiently through a car wash, topped up the tires and the fluids, and clicked his tongue at the state of the oil. That was after he displayed a terrifying competence at the mower shop, dropping off Jennifer’s ancient and indomitable warhorse of a machine.

He wasn’t quite as terrifying in the hardware store, frowning a lot and asking questions of the old guy who runs the place, nodding sometimes. It’s like he knew that the guy’s opinion of them was going to get shared around, because _everybody_ comes through that place, and apparently the old guy has known all the locals long before they were even born. He’s watchful of Jake, who always gets a terrible case of the jitters in there, but Cougar has got it hammered down on handling macho conversations that are more about listening respectfully. Apparently they bonded over the garbage disposals. Cougar said something about retiring from the service, and he opened his wallet to pull out Beth’s drawing. _“Mi sobrina._ My buddy’s niece.” He showed it to the hardware guy, proud of it. Jake hadn’t even realized Cougar kept things like that. It’s not like there’s a shortage, after all. The house is littered with Beth’s drawings.

Jake sighs. “You’re not one hundred per cent sure?”

The hat brim dips in a nod, and then Cougar is twisting around checking his mirrors, shoulders bunching. Jake has to fight the sudden and irrational desire to grab the man and kiss him silly.

Apparently Cougar can tell this is happening, because in a pause, waiting for another car to pass them, his right hand pats Jake’s thigh firmly. Jake looks up into the man’s gaze, and he thinks, Cougar’s _hand_ … and then he thinks, _Cougar naked…_ and then Cougar grins a very rowdy grin at him and shakes his head, and puts the car in gear.

“Let’s just say the novelty has not worn off,” Jake says.

“ _Bueno,”_ Cougar growls, watching his rear view mirrors. He drives for maybe three blocks--which consumes far more of the town’s amenities than Jake is used to in commercial zoning--and suddenly Cougar pulls off in front of City Hall, tucking the car into the last remaining tiny slot amidst the construction-permit crowd of working trucks. He turns off the engine, slides out of the seat belt, and watches the mirrors intently.

“Should I pull out my phone camera?” Jake says.

Cougar nods once, sharply, and opens the door, and he’s gone, sprinting.

By the time Jake is out and swinging up his phone, Cougar has dragged a guy out of the driver’s seat of an idling car in the middle of the street, has him down on the paving in a restraint hold. The guy probably has no way to know it, but that hold is Cougar being careful. He’s yelling as if Cougar is murdering him, instead of just holding him down.

Jake stands as still as he can, to improve the image he’s getting on his cell phone. He hears a couple of yelps from behind him, and then there’s guys in gimme caps running up, hands out. One of them grabs a long hammer out of a truck nearby, another grabs a yardlong level. Cougar actually tilts the hat, looking around, keeping an eye on his perimeter, waiting until he’s got a good, big audience.

Then he says, loud and clear, “If you come near the property or the car or the person of Señora Jensen again, I will know it. If you wait at the school of her daughter, I will know that. I have already given the Sheriff pictures as proof you have twice violated the restraining order against you. I will call the Sheriff the next time you do this, with more pictures. If you continue, I will take any necessary action to prevent you committing more violence against Señora Jensen and her daughter Beth. Do you understand?”

The guy is yelling something about his civil rights.

Cougar lets go, steps clear, and holds up his open hands wide for a moment. _Take your best shot,_ is what this posture says. Then he drops his hands into his pockets.

The guy crawls around on his knees, fumbles at the car door, uses that to pull himself up. In the process he puts his hand down into the car, groping around on the floor, and comes around with an ugly big lump of a gun, swinging it around toward Cougar.

He’s far too slow, of course.

Cougar has his slingshot out and he’s got a pellet in it and he’s already shot the guy three times, center mass, shoulder, and elbow, by the time the guy has the gun swung around. Or would have had it swung around, if the pellet hadn’t shattered his elbow first.

Jake stays still, keeping that phone video going. They are really going to need it.

Cougar reaches in and grabs the gun before it can fall onto the paving and discharge, dipping down to capture it, twisting it out of the man’s fingers. Then he spins out of reach, pointing the gun downward, while the man falls on the paving, face first.

_Well, that’s gotta hurt,_ Jake thinks. Jake doesn’t yell. Plenty of other people are yelling already. He just keeps the phone as steady as he can.

Cougar examines the gun, clears it, puts the mag away in his pocket, puts the gun down on the paving, and puts his slingshot away in another pocket. Then he goes down on one knee to examine the guy he just slingshotted.

Since the guy is terrified of him now, rolling on his back screaming, it can’t be what Cougar would call a proper medic-style examination, but Cougar satisfies himself that the guy doesn’t have an obvious head injury and probably isn’t bleeding out internally from the shot to his mid-section.

Then he goes around the guy’s car, not touching, just looking in, checking for any more weapons. He gives a little _tsk_ ing grimace when he looks in through the back passenger window, which means there’s probably other weapons there, and probably not in the best-kept condition.

Then he steps clear, pulls out the keys to Jennifer’s car, and looks up at Jake, drops the keys on the ground. He walks away to an area that’s a little more clear, where he drops the slingshot, his remaining pellets, and the mag to the confiscated gun. Then he gives a sigh, and goes and sits down crosslegged on the sidewalk nearby, not close enough to grab the things in one swipe, but close enough to prevent other people from grabbing either the empty gun or the mag.

“Man, that’s fucked _up,”_ says the man who’s pushed up next to Jake, gripping the sidewall on the bed of an electrician’s truck.

Jake flicks a glance up at the burly electrician. “Easy there, Cougar’s got it under control. Combat vet. Don’t worry. Call 911 for an ambulance, that jerkwad’s gotta have some broken ribs and his elbow’s a mess.”

The electrician gives him a long look. “Yeah?” he says, with his hand already reaching into a pocket for a phone. Then he’s talking to the dispatcher, calling her by first name.

“Are all dispatchers called Darlene?” Jake says then.

“I think it’s a rule,” a woman says on his other side. “You getting all this?”

“Yeah.”

“Lemme get some still shots then,” she says.

“If you think it’s safe, you might wanna take some shots looking into the back passenger window of that guy’s car,” Jake says.

“You read my mind,” she says.

He blinks down at her, wobbling a moment and then holding the phone steady again.

Tall woman, older, wearing a dark uniform. Besides the big odd-looking phone she’s taking pictures with, there’s a police badge and a dark leather belt with lots of heavy things on it.

The electrician guy doesn’t even blink, still steadily talking to Darlene, narrating the parts he saw and what’s going on. He sounds like maybe he was a vet too.

“Hi,” Jake says to the woman. “I’m Jake Jensen, that’s my friend Cougar, we just retired from the service, and this is some anti-harassment action taken to prevent my sister Jennifer Jensen from ending up in the hospital again. He was following us in her car all day long. We took pictures of that. Our car’s right over there.”

“I got those plates already,” she says.

Jake swallows. “You tired of taking NSA calls about us?”

“Weeks ago. The JSOC calls were even more fun. General Ross does not improve with time. But Agent Coulson warned me to expect that.”

Jake doesn’t wobble this time. He just makes a garbled noise and shuts up. He keeps the phone going, trying to capture first Cougar and then the guy he slingshotted, because they’re too far apart now to keep in the same frame and still have a useful level of detail.

The Sheriff turns her head and says code into the mike clipped onto her collar. It’s not any sort of standard police argot that Jake’s ever heard before. Somebody in the same kind of uniform comes up behind her, says something about a warrant in another garble of code.

“Nahh, we can serve it in the hospital, let’s get this scene secured.” She says something else into her collar mike. Then she looks at Jake again. “You’ll just have to buy your buddy a new bag of Lucille’s best sinfuls, everything stays in the cars as is.”

“Umm,” Jake says. “I’ll do that. I mean, as soon as we’re cleared. If the shop is still open by then.”

“We’ll have the paramedics take a look at Mr. Alvarez and we’ll get an incident report from him. Judging by what gossip has to say about him, that probably won’t take long. We’ll get some statements from folks here. But I can tell you Lucille will stay open if she knows you’re waiting on us. You might not be allowed to pay her, either. She’s a pretty big supporter of the women’s shelter, just in case you guys want to scrounge around for repairs and stuff to do, keep from getting bored while you’re staying in town.”

“Umm,” Jake says. “Are you _allowed_ to--?”

She nods at the short fire truck that’s just rolled up. “I’m kinda known for being blunt. Just another reason I’m getting my job done in a small town, instead of all those slow formalities you get in a big jurisdiction.”

Two paramedics climb out and start examining the guy on the ground, asking him questions, getting answers, until finally he’s not screaming, just panting hard.

“Ahh. And are you really good at twisting arms to wrangle all kinds of volunteer stuff?”

“Ayyup. I do a pretty mean guilt trip too, if I do say so myself,” she says.

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Small towns aren’t boring at all when you got plenty of things to do. Isn’t that right, Fred?”

“Yes, ma’am,” says the electrician. “Say, when we gonna get the okay to rewire that office for you guys? We keep gettin’ the no-answer-answer from His Honor the Mayor.”

“Ask the budget director.”

“We gotta do that before you can upgrade computers. The servers alone--”

“Doing an upgrade is in the hands of the almighty budget director also.”

“Jeez Louise, why’n’t you guys just call him God and start in with the hosannas already?”

She smiles. “How do you know we don’t? Hmm, could be an interesting take on -- well you know how some folks have petitioned to have longer prayers at morning roll call.”

The electrician snorts, shakes his head, and says, “Hell, I hate to leave all the fun and games, but I gotta get my permits cleared some time today.” He turns to Jake. “Your buddy gonna be okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” Jake says.

“I mean, we don’t want him having more of those PTSD issues from having to deal with this kinda nonsense,” the electrician says.

Jake finds his throat is closing up. “Yeah.”

The electrician nods at him, holds out a card. “You call if you need help, okay? Sitting with a buddy, or fixing up that old firetrap place your sister’s renting, either one, okay?”

“Okay,” Jake says.

The electrician walks away, hitches up his belt.

The Sheriff smiles. “Never misses a trick, that Fred.”

“You know I’m not permitted or certified or anything to work on your computer network or hardware, if you were thinking--” Jake says.

“You’d need to be cleared six ways from Sunday to become a city-certified contractor, but fortunately Agent Coulson forwarded me the paperwork you signed for us, just to get that started, oh, now, when was that... About three weeks ago?”

“I hope this-- this incident-- doesn’t mess up-- that process--”

She just smiles. “Oh, it might _expedite_ a few things here and there. Folks like the budget director like to see some hard facts, you know. Nothing like a little stress-testing to reassure people on how things are likely to get handled in an emergency.”

Jake squints at her in disbelief. But his phone hand stays steady, recording Cougar waiting.

She nods at him. “I might have failed to _discourage_ General Ross sufficiently about his plan to incite this ex of Jennifer’s to surface out of the woodwork around here. I should have been firmer about that, knowing we’d have to deal with it one day or another, and we’re short-handed. I guess I just totally failed to convince Ross that I’d rather not deal with Jennifer’s ex when somebody like Jennifer’s brother and his former unit are around, seeing as a Spec Ops team might deal with it quite differently than any of us local law enforcement units. Don’t worry about your phone recording everything, I got nothing to hide. Neither does Agent Coulson, or so he said. Dunno about Ross and his lot.” And she smiles again. “Don’t gawp like that, you’ll catch flies round this place, horse rental riding stable is just down the block there. I gotta go talk to them about their mosquito and fly abatement plans again.”

“Awesome,” Jake says, dazed. He continues to run the camera’s phone as Cougar is responding to the paramedics, letting them look at him, to flash a penlight in his eyes and take his pulse. A law enforcement officer talks to Cougar, the guy is wearing that same dark uniform. LEO of some kind, are they maybe county deputies? Cougar just holds his hands out. The deputy take swabs off his hands, probably for gunpowder residue, and asks him a couple more questions, looking at him closely. Turns him back over to the paramedics, possibly because Cougar is not looking badass at all, not the way he did before. He looks all tired and cold and skinny--yes, like he begs in a favela. How does he _do_ that?

“That’s a pretty souped-up phone, isn’t it?” the Sheriff asks, startling Jake again.

“Oh yeah, you gotta do some upgrades if you want a reasonable runtime on your phone videos and still keep decent image quality. I mean, it’s not gonna come out really great for broadcast news, but good enough to see what’s happening. Certainly good enough to go posting on the Internet when you want something to go viral.”

She smiles again. “I kinda thought so. My people could probably use some stuff like that, normal-looking stuff, compared to the tac gear we got on an NSA grant, but we’d be talking to the budget folks at a time we’re still fighting to avoid laying off employees.”

“Jennifer said that the school district had that too, the sales and property taxes took such a hit during the recession,” Jake says.

“They did,” she agrees, watching the paramedics putting a gurney under the injured guy.

Cougar nods to the second set of paramedics, gets up with them hovering. Cougar stretches his legs a little, and he turns to another LEO in that dark uniform who’s holding out a little pad of some kind. The LEO has Cougar press all his fingertips to it. Then he holds up a tiny microphone. Cougar says maybe four sentences, thinks about it, says one more, and nods at the officer. The officer says something into his collar mike.

The Sheriff next to Jake listens to a blurt of code, and responds briefly. The officer strolls over to her, looks at Jake holding up his cell phone, looks at the Sheriff again. She says, “Some jurisdictions are not aware it’s perfectly legal for citizens to record officers in the normal course of their duties, but we do know it. We are not arresting you or holding you pending our investigation into the reported disturbances. Would you provide us with proof of your identity?”

“I don’t have to, do I? I wasn’t driving, or involved in any hitting, or anything,” Jake says.

“No, but to substantiate your claims about the other parties in the alleged assault, we would like to see your ID, such as a driver’s license or state ID card or military ID. We would also like to take your fingerprints and to copy the cell phone recording you have been making of this incident. We are not confiscating your phone, we will be just taking an immediate copy, so we can verify our chain of evidence for any court proceedings. You may need to be able to produce it in court, however, so you shouldn’t sell it, donate it, or dispose of it for the time being.”

Jake thinks about it for a moment. Of course the ACLU would say he doesn’t need to do any of those things. Screw it, he thinks, and he says, “It’s anybody’s guess what will happen if that video goes public, if Ross’s people bring it to his attention.”

The Sheriff nods. “Understood. Do you plan on posting it publicly?”

“I have to think about it first. I’ll be happy to let you know if I decide to post it, or if I think it’s a good idea for… somebody else to post it publicly for me.”

“We’d appreciate advance notice. We may get some questions about it.”

“I’ll need to talk to your tech to let them download it safely, it has some...aftermarket security features. Nothing harmful or anything, just… embarrassing, maybe. Like the powder markers used on currency. Just for everybody’s safety.”

She smiles again. “Understood.”

“Also, what I’ve got to show you is an old state driver’s license from our last posting, and my old military ID-- okay, reaching for my wallet now,” he says.

“Pleased to meet you, Corporal Jensen,” she says.

Her officer takes Jake’s ID away to an open laptop on top of a blue and white cruiser’s open door. He starts taking pictures of Jake’s cards, front and back, with the camera built into the laptop.

Jake feels like shrugging, moving around, gesturing with his hands, but he has to hold still to keep his camera steady. “I don’t know if you heard the story on our unit from Coulson--”

She nods. “What he was able to tell us, at least. I understand a great deal is classified?”

Jake snorts. “I don’t know there’s _any_ bits we can tell you about, except a great big, _‘It wasn’t us, we didn’t do it,’_ and if we find any of the guys who did, you’ll hear about it loud and clear, because we don’t want any of _your_ guys getting fragged in the back by that lot.”

“Thank you, I appreciate the concern,” she says dryly.

Jake wonders if he should have been pointing the cell phone at her to record his own remarkable interview, but he’s kept the phone’s camera aimed at Cougar and there’s no reason to make that video less powerful by skipping viewpoints. Cougar is speaking to one of the paramedics, making a falling gesture with his hands and then pointing at his own head, explaining what injuries to look for on the guy who tried to shoot him.

Jake says absently, “Cougar--Carlos--was a medic too.”

“Understood. Will you be applying for a state driving license here?”

“We haven’t decided how long to stay, keeping all the options open, but yeah, I was thinking about doing that. If I follow through on the contractor application, sure.”

“You’ll have to stay around long enough to answer any immediate summons in the next two weeks, and give us a contact mailing address for any later requirements.” There’s an exaggerated crispness to it, as if she’s said this often enough that she’s tired of repeating herself to people who couldn’t get it properly the first time.

“Two weeks, that’s all? I thought everything was backlogged from being shorthanded--”

“It is, but our circuit court judges decided anything further was an unreasonable expense for visitors.” She speaks into her collar mike, and her junior officer brings back Jake’s ID.

Cougar nods to the paramedic and swings around, starts walking to Jake, trailed by another junior officer who’s keeping a good distance back from Cougar. Jake almost chuckles. Then he turns off his phone, and offers it to the officer who’s returning his ID.

The guy nods to the Sheriff, receives a nod back. He says, “Mr. Jensen, would you like to explain how to defuse your phone so I can take a copy of your recording? We have an adapter that I believe will fit the jack without damage.” He accepts an explanation on how to access the cell phone’s jacks without making it explode tracer stain all over him, and carries it away to his laptop.

Throughout, Cougar is frowning. “But you did not believe _I_ might set it off accidentally?”

“Dude, you use an ancient flip phone, you wouldn’t touch this one if I _tried_ to make you learn it.”

“Now I will,” Cougar huffs his ‘stache at Jake.

“Good,” Jake says, and sticks out his hand. “Deal.”

“Dishes all this week,” Cougar says, not even blinking.

Jake makes a face at him. “You are a lowlife cheating cheater of a Luddite phone-hater--”

Cougar just looks at him.

“Okay, _fine,_ I’ll do dishes all week. You’re cooking.”

“Of course.” Cougar shakes his hand, sealing the agreement. Then he turns to the Sheriff, and tells her, “I do not burn water.”

“Just because you know how to use a gas stove without burning through the bottom of stupid cheap pans,” Jake mumbles.

The Sheriff keeps a perfectly straight face. “Always good to get these things worked out.”

Cougar inclines his head, actually lifts a finger to the hat brim in salute to her. That means he’s impressed with her officers, with how well-trained they are. He doesn’t go saluting just anybody in authority.

The officer returns Jake’s phone to him, verifies some details on the technical specs, which Jake rattles on about for awhile without thinking about it very much.

Cougar looks at him.

Eventually Jake realizes that the Sheriff is looking at him too, in the same way, and he shuts up about the history of insecure TIA encryption for cell phones.

She listens to something on her earpiece, replies on her collar mike. Then she turns to Cougar, nods, and looks at Jake. “Okay, we’re done with you guys. We’ve got the keys for your sister’s car where Sergeant Alvarez left them. You can call the county impound lot in a few days, see if our lab guys got what they needed from your car.”

“That’s it? Not going down to the station?”

“Welcome to the world of high tech. You’re welcome to come and sit in the waiting room chairs if you like, but we don’t babysit and it’s only cop coffee. You don’t look like the kind who get nostalgic about MREs or instant coffee.”

He’s tempted to ask her how many siblings she has in the service, and decides he better skip it as too personal a question. “No, ma’am, definitely not. I think we’ll just walk down to Lucille’s and see if her coffee is as awesome as her candy.”

“Yes, it is,” the Sheriff says. “She might be able to wrangle you a ride back home, or call the taxi service for you.”

“Thanks,” Jake says.

They’re walking for maybe five minutes away from the scene before Jake’s shoulders start to relax.

Cougar asks, “What do they think they’ll get from lab work on Jennifer’s car?”

Jake replies, “Why didn’t you warn me that guy might be one of Jennifer’s exes?”

Cougar answers, “Ehhh. You knew he was there. Why lab stuff? Looking for samples of your DNA? Bet Ross wants it for something, seeing how you’re related to Steve.”

“Shit, you’re right.” Jake stops walking.

Cougar puts up one hand and pushes three fingers at Jake’s back warningly.

Jake starts walking again. “I’m not used to polite cops. Chatty cops. Cops who want you to tell them things but they know something’s going on bigtime so they aren’t going to beat you up. Smart cops. Spooky cops, I’m telling you.”

“Me either.”

“Poor life choices, clearly.”

“Mmm.”

“Sad, isn’t it?”

“Sí.”

“You know what’s really sad? I had no idea creepy stalker guy was one of Jen’s exes. No idea. Zero.” Jake twists up his face into a movie villain grimace and adopts a silly high Peter Lorre voice. _“What did you know about creepy stalker man and when did you know it?”_

“When he pulled up at the neighbor’s house with binocs at five am,” Cougar says.

“How did you find out Jen put a restraint order on him?”

“Didn’t. Wanted witnesses to understand. You can fix it later.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith in my ability to screw around with--”

“Mmm,” Cougar says, with a shrug. _Of course._

“Why didn’t he just shoot us?” Jake asks, baffled.

“Follow you,” Cougar says.

“To my sister,” Jake says.

“And her kid,” Cougar says.

Both of them walk for awhile in silence, which is very unusual.

“Not a pro,” Cougar says, as if he’s apologizing for something. Maybe for bringing up all the unpleasant amateur possibilities that must be dealt with.

Jake sighs. “Besides, if he was her ex, with that pile of dumb crap in his car, then yeah, for sure Jen had to get a restraining order. But why da fuuuck didn’t she tell us? Can you _forget_ about stuff like that?”

Cougar gives a shrug.

Jake points a finger at him. “Or did Ross dig him up from some mess so long ago that nobody else even knew he was still _alive?”_

Cougar squints into the distance. “Good odds.”

Jake walks a little faster. Shakes his head. “That girl has more exes that she’s admitted to me. Yes, I didn’t tell you about _this_ one, because I was _ignorant._ She’s just as bad as Clay with his cray-cray girlfriends. You know how it goes. _‘Ooooh, hey, is this bad for me? Do they stomp all over me and treat me like utter and complete garbage? Do they threaten everybody I know? Good choice, that means they really care. Oooh, that makes me all hot, that’s what I want to take to bed, because that’s just how I roll.’_ Da fuuuuck, man! And I can’t _say_ any of that to her, dammit, it’s not her fault. She always thinks it’s gonna work. Always.”

“We weren’t here then to call judgement.”

Jake shivers. In Cougar’s mouth, that word _judgement_ has a truly ferocious Biblical ring to it.

“Stop sounding like the Angel of Death and come back to earth, dammit,” Jake says crossly.

Cougar tilts up his hatbrim and looks at Jake.

“Just stop,” Jake says. “Stop _looking_ like it, too.”

Cougar looks away, moves his shoulders, not quite a shrug.

“Okay, okay, it takes awhile, okay. I get it. We’ll have some coffee, we’ll eat some excellent chocolate right out there in public like we belong there, I’ll say a bunch of really boring random shit about anything that falls into my head and you will just laugh at me, and we can stop being The Two Fucking Baddest Ass Horsemen of the Apocalypse for a little while, okay? _No corras, ten huevos,_ right? Grow a pair, right?”

“Okay,” Cougar says. “You didn’t learn that one from Dora the Explorer shows.”

“No, I did not. And we’re not teaching it to Beth, either.”

Cougar just tilts the hat brim at him, acknowledging he heard it, not that he agrees.

Jake stops walking, points at Cougar. “Dammit, I went looking for those car plates, too. It came off some secondhand lot in Detroit a year ago. I mean, hell, the transfer wasn’t ever completed. If some cop had pulled him over--”

Cougar shrugs. “He’d have shot them. Back seat was full of gun show _mierda.”_

“Yeah, soooo, sure, it’s better this way, you put a stop to his immediate trail of crime, but then what?”

“Next time he shows up, I shoot him,” Cougar says.

Jake doesn’t bother looking up. He knows that tone of voice. “If I say okay here, does that mean we planned it and I’m an accomplice?”

“Yes. So don’t say it.”

“Okay.”

“ _Güey,”_ Cougar says, and pokes him to make him start walking again. _“Cabrón.”_

“Stop with the sweet nothings, I’ll blush. Also, by the way, thanks for the heart attack, I was missing my adrenaline fix there, it’s only been three days since somebody was shooting at one of us. At you.”

“ _De nada_. It’s a small service I provide.”

“Along with sucking off guys on the kitchen table?”

Cougar stops walking. “No.”

Jake stops walking a beat later. “What?”

“ _¡Idiota! ¡Está de la verga! ¡a la ver!_ Not guys with an s. Not _plural._ No _s._ Just one. You.”

“Okay, stop with the killing look, I get it. Dumb me, using the wrong grammar, I didn’t mean it like that at all, gimme a fucking break, I’m an idiot and my hands are gonna start shaking if I don’t slurp down some caffeine _stat,_ like instantly, like right now-- hey. Wait a minute, here. You’re still totally and completely pissed off about that guy following Jennifer’s car, aren’t you?”

Cougar gives him a different look, rolls his eyes, starts walking.

“What is going on?”

“We’re getting you caffeine,” Cougar says, and starts walking even faster.

“We could jog, if you want,” Jensen says, keeping pace. “Burn out all that adrenaline, reduce the stress, let both of us be human in public, right? We don’t panic anybody if we just use a nice slow jog, get the muscles warmed up. Nobody needs to panic that we’re running, okay?”

Cougar shifts into a jog so restrained that it looks like a Paso Fino horse doing very, very careful performance steps. People look around as the pair move past, but they’re mostly looking past them at the county sheriff’s cruisers that have pulled up to the scene.

“Okay, how about a little faster?” Jensen says, and starts talking about upgrading the video card in Jennifer’s old computer so he can play better games on it. Jogging,with Jake talking the whole way, they circle past the courthouse, City Hall, and a couple of six and eight-floor office buildings. “Okay, let’s head out east, take a look at those buildings for awhile, how’s that?” Jake says.

“Toward the mall? With the electronics shop?” Cougar says, amused by now.

“But not all the way, that’s a couple miles out, and I still don’t see how you run in those boots. Also, the mall store is a puny, stunted place where old cell phones go to die, I can only handle so much thrift store chic.”

“Not doing it right,” Cougar says.

“Yeah?”

“ _Mi hermana--”_

“Pantera, right?”

Cougar makes a hand gesture, maybe-so, maybe-not. “Stage name.”

“Right.”

“--she could walk in anywhere, spend five bucks, and come out looking like she owned all of this town--” another hand wave.

Jake grins “I can imagine.”

“ _Vato,_ if you hit on _mi hermana--”_ Cougar says.

“I won’t. I’ll just think about it, how’s that? I’d have to be _dead_ not to.”

Cougar just shakes his head at this quote coming back at him like a boomerang.

“Besides, she’d be perfectly capable of teaching me manners _any_ time she wanted.” Jake leers happily at Cougar.

Cougar mutters something in Spanish. Jake thinks it might be something about juvenile goats spewing total shit.

“Any time at all,” Jake says. “The boots, man. It’s gotta be the boots.”

“ _Idiota. No eres una marica,”_ Cougar says.

“ _Marica_ , that’s faggot, right? Naaah, I don’t think so. I think we’re talking about how I am getting some kind of fixation on the person or their character or something, not the plumbing. Yeah, you and me, I think we gotta admit we’re bisexual,” Jake says breezily.

“I don’t admit anything,” Cougar says, and picks up the pace. If he thinks it will make Jake shut up, he’s in for an enlightening little run. He ought to know better, it’s never stopped Jake before. They’re trotting along sidewalks past a strip mall. It peters off into dirt trail along the paved road, with the tracks of kids, lots of them, walking to school and back again. Then Cougar says, “I thought that stalker guy might be a pedophile.”

“Did you happen to see his ID when the paramedics talked to him?”

“Of course. Old format, though.”

“I will look him up and see if we get any hits on the molester registration lists, right? Might be way out of date, but no harm looking. If he’s one of Ross’s tools, God She only knows what crap he’s got up to. That bunch blackmailed half the guys they recruited, as best I can tell. And I still haven’t finished checking the databases, cross-referencing Max’s subcontractors against Ross’s units against bank codes. Stalker guy could be one of Max’s tools at the same time.”

“Simple search words, cut and paste, I could help you on Max’s suppliers,” Cougar says.

“You totally could. You want to? I could set you up on Jen’s desktop, port over the spreadsheets, show you how to do some badass tracking for file numbers. I mean, it totally works, but it looks boring as shit unless you’re motivated.”

Cougar gives a weird noise. A laugh, sort of. “Hard to lose motivation on fresh spore.”

“Yeah,” Jake says, thinking over the details on how he’s going to make the searches as easy and fast as possible for Cougar in a way he hadn’t bothered to do for himself.

“Will it help?” Cougar says.

“Yeah, it really will,” Jake says. “It will.”

“Good,” Cougar says.

“Will it help you too?”

“I think so.”

“You know how bomb-sniffing dogs and search-and-rescue dogs need to hunt things, they gotta be out there working? Is it like that?”

“Yeah. It’s like that.”

“Okay,” Jake says. “Good to know. Cougar the total badass Sergeant on the hunt--”

“Sitting the way you do for hours, it’ll be total sore ass, and that’s _retired_ Sergeant,” Cougar says.

Jake starts laughing, and the upset rhythm starts a muscle twitch between his ribs. He waves his hand in their usual signal to slow down, as he’s running low on air to talk anyway. Time to ease down and start turning back. Cougar turns with him.

“Thank you, man, for today,” Jake says.

“ _De nada,”_ Cougar says, as always. He whuffs out a deep breath, drops to a slower jog.

Jake is still panting. “We are so out of shape. I blame those weeks before New York, sitting in hiding.”

“Lots of good strength-building, lots of stretching, not enough aerobics,” Cougar agrees.

“Pretzel-man,” Jake says.

“Chocolate,” Cougar corrects him, waving a forefinger at him.

“I can go with that program. Give me some caffeine, I am down with that. I’ll buy, she already knows me.”

“You’re the only one with a card that works,” Cougar says.

“I have been meaning to fix that, sorry, bro. The requirement to obtain this with completely legal funds has been a bit of a challenge, even with Coulson’s help.”

“I know.”

“Where in hell would we be if we didn’t have Coulson?”

Cougar grunts.

Jake answers his own question. “The embassy in Mongolia, if we were lucky. Not so much, we’d be in the special hospital, getting to know all the fun people.”

Cougar gives him a fierce look from under the hat brim: _No, not going there again._

“No, not happening, right? That’s what I told Tony Stark at the barbecue. You know what’s funny? JARVIS sent me a file, day before the party, it was all these pages and pages of staff notes. Scans of handwritten notes from that place they sent you after your second team died.”

Cougar gives a grunt. It’s not a friendly noise, but he’s not warning Jake off it, either.

Jake says, “One of Ross’s fancy places rebuilt from Victorian madhouses, I guess.”

“Not that much. Old cell blocks worked in behind the nice door in the secret ward.”

“And how would you know that, my friend, unless you spent time there?”

Cougar grunts. “That’s where they sent all their bad boys. Couldn’t stop me wandering the new wards, make sure the orderlies weren’t hurting anybody again.”

Jake grunts back at him.

Cougar shrugs. “Seemed like the least I could do, after the Army gave me all this fancy training.”

“Enforce the rule of law?”

“Yeah, they didn’t have much of that.”

“Kinda the impression I got, reading over that stuff. So I’m here to tell you that we don’t need to worry about that place, it’s _gone._ Lawsuits, countersuits, unnamed bodies in the back lawn, all kinds of stuff to make directors resign. You went through there like an effin’ tornado. They were fuckin’ terrified of you, Cougs. Or maybe I should say, Don Quixote’s Ghost, huh?”

Cougar makes an irritable twitch, flicking it all away with one hand. “Still got pus under that scab.”

Jake says, “I figured. Should I stop?”

Cougar runs a half a block, thinking about it. Jake lets him, not talking at all. Jake’s a little concerned that Cougar might lapse back into one of his nonverbal spells completely, where it can take him a week to come out of it.

“Tell me what you got,” Cougar says, in that strange rough voice he has just coming _out_ of one of those spells.

“Right,” Jake says. “So, this guy Ghost, they were afraid of letting him _look_ at them. Just looking, man. Terrified. And not because Ghost coulda killed all of ‘m with a little finger. No. Ghost had that place down cold, like he coulda fuckin’ read their minds, every last one of them, and he said things to them that just left them jibbering in their little rodent brains. Not gross shit, not sneaky _Silence of the Lambs_ shit, just simple plain stuff about _them._ Stuff that just grabbed their twisted little psyches and cracked them like eggs. _Why are you afraid of us? Why do you take pictures of orderlies beating up teenagers in restraints who can’t fight back? Why do you keep chattering at pretty women who will never look at you? They look at me, but they never look at you._ Horrible, man. Did you go after _every_ last doctor on staff there?”

“Mmhmm,” Cougar agrees, like it’s no big deal. “Except Captain Minot. She was a decent human being. Place was destroying her without my help. She tried hard to stop the abuses, get us some help. I figured getting the place shut down around her ears...make her get out… that was a kindness. She’d have to get some help for her anxiety disorder.”

“I can try to find out her story afterward, if you like,” Jake says.

Cougar grunts. “Won’t be pretty. But yes, please.”

“I guess you _destroyed_ that one doctor who had been sexually abusing patients in the locked wards at other places for years.”

“It wasn’t that hard to do,” Cougar says, almost more breath than actual sounds.

“Jeeebus Crackers on spam sandwiches, man!” Jake hears himself say.

Cougar shrugs. “Picked up one of his condoms from a patient’s cunt. Coupla orderlies called Rip and Rap, that night I let ‘em fuck my ass until I was bleeding, more than they usually got to do me. I walked myself down to the manager’s office, did passwords on his computer, unlocked his camera. Splashed that condom all over me and bled on the last of their office paper. Wrote blood on the walls, sent out pictures of it. Put in some selfies. Sent it out in emails, got those addresses from records and letters I saw people handling. Don’t know how I kept it together enough, things were going out of focus a lot. Hard to do. Take it slow. I must’ve been there five hours that night. Plenty of time.” He nods.

Jake says, “What happened then?”

“Right down the hole with _me,_ when they finally caught up. I was out running in the park, halfway off the grounds, made ‘em work for it, they didn’t like that. I didn’t know if _anything_ was gonna happen from all that work. They told me crazy shit, figured I’d end up just another guy planted under the lawn. But somebody out there recognized selfies from old jobs with Clay’s unit. Clay and Roque led in two squads of National Guard and I don’t even know how many VA doctors. Cleared everybody out. Heard the screaming through all the soundproofing. Talk about the wrath of God, they cleared the place. Claimed there might be a gas leak when they first took the building, I guess. All I know, Roque hauled me on a gurney out of the secret ward in the jacket with my bare ass hanging out. Still had blood all over me, down my legs. They took pictures. Got pictures of everybody coming out of those cells. Hell, plenty worse than I was. But Roque wouldn’t let anybody else _touch_ me except Pooch. Oh, and Jolene. Jolene was in town, dunno why, she and Pooch got me cleaned up in the old van. Hurt like fuck, all black and blue where people beat on me. Jolene put all these tiny butterfly bandages on that cut on my balls. She kept telling me to yell as much as I wanted. Lost my voice for a couple days. She is one steel magnolia.”

Jake grunts agreement. “She’s sure an amazing mother.”

“Yeah, Pooch picked a good ‘un. So he got somebody to get me some of the good stuff, got me settled in the van, took me back to the house. Clay got one of the VA doctors to swing by and check on me, but they kept me at the house. Pooch and Jolene went away on vacation, Clay had to go to CENTCOM for a week, so it was just Roque and me. We got into it a few times--fell down the stairs in one fight, broke shit on both of us, had to go in to the VA for that-- but he always sat up with me so I could rest. Roque said they had too much annual leave built up anyway, might as well use it up at one go anyway. He was always yelling mad, or drunk off his ass, those days. _Don’t you ever be calling me a big ol’ marshmallow, you snotty skinny long-haired uppity lil sniper punk.”_

Jake is startled into laughing.

Cougar jogs along at Jake’s slower pace, frowning. Finally he adds, “Really would have preferred getting direct evidence on Doctor Rape, did the best I could.”

“Yeah,” Jake says, and drops down to a slower pace yet, trying to quiet the wheeze he’s building up. Damn allergies. “Doesn’t sound like it was _easy,_ though.”

“Oh, it was. Compared to our regular jobs, getting into position? Easy. I had time to study them, to remember every last little crumb on a tie, every stain on their pants, to listen, to plan the way I would in a hostile prison cell. They were Ross’s tools. They were off in their own little world of illusions and shadows... cruelty in the name of the higher good... for the ones that believed anything at all. They didn’t pay attention to anything besides their own little bubble...so they collected all kinds of maggots on support staff. They were not legitimate doctors any longer. No reason to filter the truth, to be kind. To be human.”

His boots pound steadily along the paving, they’ve traveled back to to store fronts now.

“That clarity… so easy. Everything stripped down, simple. All reflexes. The meds took away… so much. Not the hunter. They got this very slow, dumbed-down guy who knew how to murder them and really wanted to and couldn’t...quite… remember why. Didn’t matter why. They couldn’t figure out why their drugs didn’t stop it. Lizard brain, ancient. Just wait, they will come to you. Wait. So simple. Human is so… much harder. Webs pulling in all directions. Decisions. Obligations. Complicated. Took awhile to… add the layers back on, fix the busted places so I know how to behave. Most of the time. Army didn’t fucking care, they just wanted the lizard who goes to church like a good boy and kills things when you unclip his leash. I didn’t want a fucking leash. I wanted… I want… to know things for myself. Clay and Roque and Pooch helped on that.”

“I hear you, after being held up the perfect posterboy for ADHD and OCD because I missed every last one of the social cues and did a total fail on the interaction rules and somehow I ended up saying ridiculous shit that offended every regular human in my old unit, not to mention my old entire fucking battalion,” Jake says on one long breath, exhaling.

“Regiment,” Cougar says, which is next up the scale in size. Totally straight-faced, the jerk.

“You’re _such_ a Big Blue Meanie,” Jake says.

“And you’re not OCD. Not enough rituals. Too good at pull-it-out-of-your-ass emergencies. Maybe Asberger’s Syndrome, somewhere along the autism spectrum of obnoxious, but not OCD or an obsessive personality disorder. Not enough control freak there.” He says it as if he’s amused by this, not angry or grim or anything. Just like that, the past is gone and he’s back in the present, breathing more easily, moving in that rhythm he can keep up for miles if his boots hold out.

“Why, thanks, I think,” Jake says.

His stride is quite different from Jake’s, but they’ve learned that four of his strides equal three of Jake’s, and he can mesh it to Jake’s movements in this very odd waltz-type sound, one-two-three, one-two-three-four. Or possibly jazz. It could be a very cool groove in jazz, but Jake can’t decide if it should be all horns and sharp chrome sounds or all soft fuzzy late-night strings getting drunk off their asses. Or maybe passages of both, which is the way it sounds when Cougar decides words are best for something. Usually he seems to think body language is better, more accurate. It’s as if the hat’s inflections, his hand gestures, the maddening shrugs, are better at what he wants to say. Whether _you_ understand Cougar-speak is beside the point.

Then Cougar says, “You help too. You make it easier to stay human. To know the right things to do.”

Jake stumbles a step, loses his rhythm, pulls up to bend over, rest his hands on his knees, and breathes hard for a moment. “Cougs, I… I dunno what to say. That’s the… fuck, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said to me.”

Cougar turns, jogs back to him, stops, and starts stretching out his hamstrings, bending over double. Pretzel-man, seriously. “I’ll have to think of a better thing to say tomorrow.”

Jake looks up, and huffs out a laugh. He sounds a little wheezy, he knows.

Cougar says gravely, “We should get you checked for exercise asthma. I have been thinking this for awhile. It’s bigger, more often.”

“Oh, I’m probably allergic to some of the stuff growing out here, I always get like this at Jen’s place. Mowing is worse, my face used to puff up, that shit was awful.”

“Steve used to have asthma, before the serum. He told me about that.”

“Pretty severe, wasn’t it?”

“I believe so.”

“Why didn’t I get the good stuff from him?”

“You did. Your speed, your size, your strength, your kindness, your brain. You just use it and assume that’s how it is for most people.”

“But Steve wasn’t big or fast before the serum, that wasn’t genetic--”

“He says it was. He says his doctors think now the serum just took away some things that got in the way. This is probably why Ross in interested in your genetics too.”

“Fuck Ross and the fascist tank he rode in on,” Jake says, and suddenly he’s tired. Tired to the bones.

Cougar stretches out his Achilles tendons, his shoulders. “Figure that’s coming up soon on the agenda too. I will help on the data crunching.”

“Chocolate first, Cougs. Also, coffee.”

“Also food. I am hungry now.”

“Good sign, I like that. How about we ask Lucille for recommendations, what do you think?”

“If you are not careful how you ask, she may want to take us to dinner, and there will be larger expectations on doing repairs at the women’s shelter,” Cougar says.

Jake shakes his head. “Did you hear _everything_ the Sheriff said to me?”

“Some, not all. There were distractions.”

“Okay, Mister Spock, see if you can tell if Lucille’s still got the front door unlocked.”

“It is,” Cougar says.

“Do you _want_ to do repairs at the women’s shelter?”

Cougar nods. “I think it would be a very wise investment whether or not we stay longer, and deserves to be done anyway.”

“You think the Sheriff _wants_ us hanging around the shelter, doing things there.”

Cougar nods.

Jake says, “Maybe for the same reason she didn’t arrest you for assault right there in the street?”

Cougar slants a look at him under the hat brim. “You mean, stopping other creepy stalker guys from hanging around the women’s shelter?”

“Yeah, that one.”

Cougar makes a little moue with his lips. “Ehhh, you just thanked me for raising your adrenaline level back to normal.”

Jake rolls his eyes. “For the Losers, anyway.”

“What will you need in _another_ three days?” Cougar says.

“Cute. Very cute. You know how I hate doing house repairs? You are a brute, you know that?”

“Doing repairs, you will probably learn something,” Cougar says, and opens the door to the chocolatier’s shop. He pauses a moment, just appreciating. The smell alone is deadly intoxicating.

“Hi Lucille, it’s Jake again. You won’t believe what just happened!”

Cougar just smiles under his hat and walks along after Jake to be introduced to the absolutely most important shop owner in town, if you were to ask Cougar’s personal opinion. And that’s before Lucille takes off her purple hair tie with a shout and kisses Jake on both cheeks. Long before she starts talking about what the women’s center _really_ needs, and demands that they shall go with her for food at the best diner in the state.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation notes are mostly thanks to Wikipedia, so please feel free to comment to give me a correction for misleading or inaccurate statements.
> 
> De nada means “it’s nothing,” equivalent to “don’t worry about it,” similar to the Australian phrase, “No worries.”
> 
> Mi sobrino means “my niece”, so in Spanish at least, Cougar is claiming Beth as his niece by choice, not just as “his buddy’s niece.”
> 
> Apparently Jensen has been trying to learn some more Spanish on his own. His sources may be questionable (like mine are…) Some of the new Spanish phrases in this chapter arrives via Wikipedia, on a page detailing Spanish profanities with notes on country/regional variations. These do NOT translate correctly if you put them through computer translators like Google’s Translate.  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabron#Pinche
> 
> Mierda is a noun meaning "shit." However, phrases such as Vete a la mierda (literally: "Go to (the) shit") would translate as "Go to hell."
> 
> Huey/Güey is a common term in Mexico, coming from the word buey that literally means "ox" or "steer." It means "stupid" or a "cheated husband/boyfriend/cuckold." It can be used as a less offensive substitute for cabrón when used among close friends. Mexican teenagers and young Chicano men use this word routinely in referring to one another, similar to "dude" in English. 
> 
> Cabrón means "big goat" or "stubborn goat" - in the primitive sense of the word, cabrón is an adult male goat; cabra is an adult female goat). Used in Spain, Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico, as a generic insult. The Mexican Spanish version is offensive as it means "asshole" and other insults in English. The expression ¡Ah cabrón! is used sometimes when one is shocked/surprised by something. Among close friends, the term is often inoffensive; however, it is not a word to be used casually with strangers.  
> As an adjective it is equivalent to "tough" as "It is tough" (Está cabrón).  
> To some extent, it can also be used with an ironically positive connotation meaning great, amazing, phenomenal, or bad-ass. Such expressions would be said as: ¡Estás cabrón! or ¡Yo soy cabrón!. The word is quite flexibly used in Puerto Rico, and it can even have completely opposite meanings depending on the context. Best friends call each other cabrón in a friendly manner, while it may also be used in an offensive manner. One might say, Esta cabrón to describe something as very good or very bad depending on the circumstance.
> 
> No corras, ten huevos means "Don't run away, have some balls".  
> Tenga huevos translates as "Have some balls". For example one can hear a Mexican say, No corras, ten huevos which means "Don't run away, have some balls".
> 
> ¡Está de la verga! means "This is very difficult!"  
> This is Mexican slang from the word verga, the word for yardarm used as an analogy for the penis. Similarly, the wiki writers note that in the United States, the variant a la verga or a la ver for short, is very common in northern New Mexico, and is used frequently as an exclamatory expletive.
> 
>  
> 
> Abbreviation notes:  
> LEO is a general abbreviation for Law Enforcement Officer.
> 
> NSA is the National Security Agency, which has been mentioned with increasing frequency in news reports since Edward Snowdon’s revelations.
> 
> JSOC is the Joint Special Operations Command, established in 1980 following the failed rescue of American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran as "an obscure and secretive corner of the military's hierarchy," noted the Atlantic. It experienced a "rapid expansion" under the Bush administration, and since Obama came to power, "appears to be playing an increasingly prominent role in national security" and "counterterrorism," in areas which were "traditionally covered by the CIA…”  
> Source:  
> Max Fisher, "The Special Ops Command That's Displacing The CIA," The Atlantic, 1 December 2009:  
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/12/the-special-ops-command-thats-displacing-the-cia/31038/
> 
> ADHD is Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. See Wikipedia for more details.
> 
> OCD is Obsessive-compulsive disorder, not to be confused with similarly-named obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Also, see Wikipedia for more details.


	12. Entertaining the Carpenter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake gets stuck midway through his flaky idea for constructing a storm safe room, and Cougar makes him figure out a different way out of the dilemma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is modified from the original version, a prompt fic which stood alone and didn't reference so many details of construction or the local folks who show up in this story.
> 
> I snagged two prompts from fic_promptly http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/211488.html :  
> mine http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/211488.html?thread=8873760#cmt8873760
> 
> prompt by jujitsuelf, The Losers - Cougar - ‘Give every man thy ear but few thy voice’  
> prompt by peaceful_sands, The Losers, Jensen, ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.’

Jake is mainly talking just to hear the echo in the basement. He repeats random quotes he pulls up, flipping around different websites on his smartphone, booming out bits and fragments of Twain and Edgar Allen Poe and Einstein and Alexander Pope and of course Shakespeare. His phone isn't getting great reception in here, so this is the best he can do for entertainment right now, the sports channels are stuttering and lagging too badly.

He goes down on one knee when he quotes Romeo and Juliet, flinging up his hand imploringly at Cougar, who is just looking at him from the basement steps. Cougar shakes his head, picks up tools and nails from the remaining basement shelves, and steps up the rickety wood ladder on the far side, steps off that onto a narrow strip of scaffolding like it's a big fat tree branch. The green sappy two-by-fours Cougar is standing on flex under him as he bangs nails into studs, and he just sways and balances with it. They got a deal on those, since they were only going to be scaffolding, and he checked for knots and splits when he knocked it together, but it still looks alarming.

"Better a witty fool than a foolish wit!" Jake declaims.

"Twelfth Night," Cougar grunts.

"Really? How do you know that?"

Cougar smiles at his work, not looking around.

He wasn’t in such a good mood earlier, when Jake was banging around, sliding cast iron bathtubs down here. 

At the crack of dawn Cougar went out to meet the scrap metal guy’s truck, because Jake hadn’t woke up yet, and paid the guy as Jake asked him to from under the blankets, and Cougar even asked the guy’s help to get the load of bath tubs dumped close to the outside cellar doors. Then Cougar watched silently, arms folded, while Jake got a lumber slider organized to take the tubs down the steps into the basement. 

“Safety room walls!” Jake explained happily, halfway through lining them up to check the fit.

Cougar just shook his head. “You can’t weld cast iron like that.”

Which had blown a great big hole in Jake’s plans. Huge Hole. “But--”

Cougar shook his head. “Not an amateur job.” He pointed at Jake and at himself. “Amateurs.”

“But Cougar--”

“But nothing. We can drill and cage them. It’ll only be as strong as the cage structure. Sheet metal would weld up, make a lot easier barrier, take less room.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before--”

“You didn’t ask,” Cougar said, and he just walked away when Jake started swearing. An hour later, Jake was sitting on one of the upside down tubs, glumly holding his laptop, out of ideas and out of steam, when Cougar reappeared. Cougar pushed the slider off the steps with a crash, and stomped down the steps, and thumped Jake on the arm--ow!--and told him to start logging in measurements for all the angle iron they’d need to buy. Made him do all the calculations. Plus, extra lumber. Cougar told him this house has never heard of code, it could never pass a decent inspection anyway, and they’re going to fix some of it. 

Then he’d dragged Jake into the hardware store and watched while Jake laid out what they needed with the skeptical hardware guy, and bought it. Plus extra saw blades for the circular saw they found in the basement, and extra drill bits. A spade bit to cut holes for wiring, even. Plus extra two by fours, and lots and lots of boxes of nails, because Cougar had decided he was going to add more sleepers to the studs just above the basement. Apparently the stupid old pile looked like it’d fly away in the first bad storm.

“It’s forty years old, how many storms has it survived--” Jake complained.

Cougar just looked at him, brow raised, and the hardware store owner looked at him with the very same look, and said something about Cat5 storms lately. Jake decided to stop talking about it in the store. 

So far, Cougar had been cutting the sleepers gradually, using leftover chunks as he went about building the floor framing for the safe room. Apparently he has to cut each sleeper for the old walls to custom size because the studs are spaced so unevenly. There’s been a lot of Spanish words that sound pretty nasty. Yeah, words Jake has never heard before.

"Give every man thy ear but few thy voice," Jake says, a little cranky about it.

"Hamlet," Cougar says.

"You know that's weird, right?" Jake said.

Cougar just keeps banging nails into the old studs, drilling and securing long tails of the angle iron verticals into studs just above the concrete wall of the basement. When he leaves the angle irons behind, he continues sliding the ladder along the wall, banging in nails holding the sleepers, twisting at weird directions, sometimes straining to reach. 

This isn’t for the storm safety room at all. It’s to stiffen the house’s first floor walls and help tie the walls down onto the footings. Midway through the morning, stopping for coffee, they’d had that discussion about whether stiffening the house walls might stop it from flexing and yielding to force, might make it even less able to survive high winds. Cougar said it was more likely to slide off its footings and fall apart in chunks than to flex like bamboo might. 

The “falling chunks” bit is why they’ve been thrashing over design ideas for reinforcing the most crucial bit of the safe room, the ceiling. They had that discussion too. Jake argued for making it out of more bathtubs. Cougar stated flatly that failure of the framing that holds the bathtubs over a person’s head would be far more lethal than mere collapse of a sheet metal roofing. He growled that he’s not an architect, and none of this would ever pass inspection anyway. Jake had to coax him back into a better mood by asking him about the crazy stuff he’d done constructing surveillance hides.

Cougar goes through boxes of nails. Up the wooden ladder and down he goes, until Jake has the presence of mind to grab up the boxes and hold them out for Cougar to grab. God forbid that Cougar would actually ask him for trivial help like that, Jake is supposed to be paying enough attention to make the offer without being asked. Mindread, or something. Cougar only asks for help when he has to have it. Cougar grunts, accepting the offer, but he's still squinting at the knots in the wood in front of him. The studs are lousy with knots.

"How come you remember so much of the Scottish play, anyway?"

Cougar hums, pulls a last nail out of his mouth, bangs it in place. Three firm whaps and the thing slides in as if the wood is so much butter. Cougar shakes his head, makes a face, brushes a dirty thumb over the owl's-eye hammer mark he left. When Jake tried to drive the very same nails, it was more like the nails were butter and the studs were made of iron.

Also, yuck, Cougar's mouth has been full of galvanized nails from not exactly the cleanest boxes. If Jake was considering kissing the man silly for his help, various macho carpentry habits like that are putting him off the attempt. When Cougar was drilling and driving in concrete anchors, lower down on the wall, he was covered in concrete dust from his boots to the respirator he wore, and there's still gray streaks on his shirt and down his legs. The sniper has a habit of using his boots or his knees as third hands, too, clearly used to working alone. Jake is a little concerned how it's going to go when Cougar starts welding up angle iron into the cage for the wall of tubs. Jake was able to borrow a welding rig from Mr. Strauss, at the cost of a great deal of gossip to come, along with socializing demands from Mrs. Strauss. But that’s to be expected anyway, since they’ll be working at the women’s shelter next week, and she’ll want to know all about how that goes. She offered to help pay for supplies there, even.

Jake holds the ladder steady while Cougar comes down, which is a way of annoying him.

Cougar pauses when he's head-level with Jake, which is not typical for ordinary conversations. "Boring dad-blather." He leans over closer to Jake, bumps Jake's shoulder. "Polonius is a pompous jerk."

Jake knows his mouth is hanging open stupidly. "How do you-- you read Shakespeare?"

"Had an English teacher who used to be a Marine DI. Coached the ball teams too. Big on fight choreography, teaching guys how to look flashy but nobody gets hurt." 

Jake blinks again. "Wait a minute. That doesn't explain why you know so many lines."

"Prompt the cheerleaders and the quarterback for three months, you know the lines."

Jake squints into the amused eyes. "Why-- wait a minute, why would you volunteer--"

Cougar gives a shrug. "So I was a horny little teenager. With a good memory."

Jake splutters. "Did that actually work?"

"Ahh, that would be telling," Cougar says, and steps down the ladder and walks away.


	13. Small Town Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As you might expect, some of the locals have formed their own ideas already about integrating these new Losers guys into the community. Of course Fred the electrician has some advice for the guys--things that don't mesh in, don't fit right, just bug him until he does something about it. He's the kind of person who makes things work right away, not some indefinite time down the road a year from now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my beta-reader here, cougars_catnip, who is always great at brainstorming, serving above and byond the call of duty on typos and dumb overlooked bits. THANKYOU!

 

“Nice,” Fred says, nodding at the angle iron welds that hold together the sheet metal cover over the bath-tub shelter wall. Fred may be a properly certified electrician, but he’s clearly used to coping with scavenger-style construction.

“Army taught me welding,” Cougar says.

“Me too,” Fred says. He squints around the rest of the basement. “Let’s get that power feed up off the floor, take it down from the kitchen wall instead. So, Greg told me to ask you guys what else needs doing, whatever you want put in, he’s good for it, just to let him know. So I’m cc’ing him on my plan emails. He wanted me to rebuild the main box, not just get it up to code. You want to run some power for the new satellite dish, rewire the bedrooms and the bathroom. You want the living room redone too?”

“Yes, for Jake’s computers,” Cougar says.

Fred snorts. “Power all the things, huh? He’s building a cute set-up there. I should have him build me a new system, we could do a barter swap thing on that, if you want to tell him.”

“Sí,” Cougar agrees.

Fred the electrician doesn’t even need to get up on a ladder, he just stretches and touches one of the darker studs rising from the footings atop the basement walls.. Black comes off on his fingertips. “Somebody did a decent job rewiring the kitchen awhile ago. Maybe they had a little grease fire damage to fix, see how the stud plate is singed? See all kinds of interesting stuff when you look behind the sheetrock, I’m telling you.”

Cougar just nods. Coming through the house, he and Fred had that conversation sorting out the units they served in, which big-PR-name general was a bigger asshole to serve under, which only-in-the-military problems were mutual hate-ons, and which guns were the biggest waste of space and which were under-appreciated. Cougar stopped when he finally heard himself running on the same way that Jake does, expounding on different guns for different uses. Fred just grinned at him and told Cougar he’d make some friends in the duck hunting club if he ever could afford to join.

Now Fred examines a patch where Cougar fixed a dusty bad repair on a partially-burnt stud. “Yep, right behind the stove, huh. At least it’s not a wiring problem catching fire, thank God,” Fred comments. “I mean, damn, you open up some of these walls, lose a year off your life when you see shit you gotta report to the cops. Don’t need to share the nightmares, but there’s houses you can’t talk about later, you know?”

Cougar nods, looking at him slantwise.

Fred sighs. “I probably oughta give you a heads-up, stuff ain’t all pretty cows mooing over the cheese wrappers, round these parts. I hope Gus at the gun range warned you the local NRA chapter president is a fragile little flower who--let’s put it nicely--is easily upset by criticism, and doesn’t respond well to losing shooting competitions.”

Cougar gives a wry smile. “Yeah, he said. Told him I’m not into wasting time proving anything to the NRA. He told me maybe I should, I need to establish my standing with other parts of the community. How did he say it-- _‘besides the liberals who are raving about how you two worked on the women’s shelter for free. That is ticking off the local contractors who won’t do volunteer stuff because they’re scrambling so hard for paid work. Also, fights might get picked in local bars, and no, that isn’t a good way to establish macho street cred with the real powers-that-be in the community.’”_

Fred blinks at him. “Jeez, man, you could do stand-up comedy. That sounds exactly like him.”

Cougar waves one hand aside in self-deprecation.

Fred runs a critical thumb over another stud, and says, “Well, hell, in spite of the fact a lot of people don’t want to hear Gus talk about anything--boy, he does like to hear himself talk-- and he’s lost some friends at church since he outed that evangelical pastor’s embezzlement to his church board of directors--that’s a whole other nasty story, believe me-- I guess folks were paying attention when he talked about your shooting. I guess nobody directly questions your expertise since you spent some quality time at the range impressing the fuck out of Gus.”

Cougar frowns. “Just zeroing my new rifles, running some drills, nothing special.”

Fred snorts, shakes his head. “You mean, nobody was shooting back. Some of these folks, they got no clue what ‘special’ means.”

“You do,” Cougar says mildly.

Fred snorts. “It don’t mean shit to folks in charge of paperwork at the VA hospital, which is where it counts for you and me.”

Cougar nods.

What surprises Cougar is that Fred actually _says_ the next bit. “You know, there’s people in town who been saying nasty things. Some of the gossips claim they saw you horsing around with Jake at the women’s shelter. Claimed they parked close, make sure they could see it.”

Cougar just stares at him. “There was no horsing. We all worked. Sanded down sheetrock seams. Wearing respirators. Directed by the licensed contractor who was volunteering out there--”

“Yeah, Solomon, who takes no shit from nobody. Funny as hell. Always doin’ mitzvahs for folks, and hey, he’ll guilt you into helping too. Also, keeps his word. Great guy.”

Cougar frowns. There’d been damn little _talking_ involved. “Solomon only had one day on painting prep. Tight deadline to get the place occupied.”

“I bet. Yeah, well, nothing to stop the backdoor league from making shit up when the truth is boring. At least we got some standards around here. The gossip has to prove they actually visited the place, or the rest of us won’t listen, and that’s the truth.”

Cougar stares at him. “That’s not usual, is it?”

Fred starts to laugh. “Man, it’s been awhile since you lived in a small town, right? Anyway, they’re saying it’s not just cute buddy stuff by weird socially-inappropriate Jake. _Everybody_ remembers Jake.”

Cougar can feel himself starting to bristle, squaring out his stance.

Fred holds up both hands. “Hey, easy there, easy--”

Cougar gives a stiff nod, folding his arms, leaning back against the basement wall in the harsh light of the two bare bulbs. “Sorry. I am… touchy when people rag on him. He can fight his own fights just fine, as he reminds me all the time.”

Fred just grins. “I bet. He’s grown up so big, man. ‘s why it’s so funny to hear them saying the two of you are fairies.”

Cougar doesn’t move, doesn’t blink when he looks up at Fred.

Fred just stares back. It strongly reminds Cougar of Clay’s unhappy stern face, which is never good news.

Cougar nods once. “They could ask, if it was important for anything. I can’t see why. Jake and I are here in the house fixing things while Jennifer is away. We eat, we feed chickens, we buy stuff. We swear a lot when we’re working on things. Yes, very wild ex-soldiers--we aren’t going out, we aren’t hitting bars, we aren’t chasing the local women, not even the underage ones. I used to meet girls a lot, but that would be rude of me in Jennifer’s town, and I am not intending to be rude to Jennifer’s friends and coworkers. So, yes, very boring of us. We sleep a lot more than we used to in the field, that’s new. What else would concern people? I don’t know. Perhaps I lack imagination?”

Fred’s eyes go wide, and then he starts to laugh. Finally he sobers, and he says, “It is purely acid green horrible stuff they’re spreading, let me tell you. I don’t fucking approve of people poisoning the local community with their personal hangups and ignorance and fuckall witless puppeting of what TV tells ‘em to think. What TV tells them, that crap is all coming from some big companies what ain’t friends to anybody round here, and that’s a fact. Broke up with my last girlfriend over that propaganda shit, and I don’t miss it being gone, either. I won’t be having that in any house of mine. I just don’t get these sillyass guys who believe crazy shit about science bein’ a pack of Satan’s lies and they’ll just make it all up, they don’t need to figure out what the resistor on a damn circuit diagram is gonna do, and gee, then they wonder why the kitchen caught fire. So that’s the style of anti-everything that these same dumb bunnies are parroting.”

“Thank you.” After a moment Cougar realizes that might not be a good response if Fred takes it as thanks for breaking up a romance. He casts around for something more. “Are you asking? Are you asking if-- “ The words just hang there, stuck in his throat. “--if I-- if Jake--” he can’t say it, which astonishes him even more. This is not good. He has to do much better than this if he’s going to explain things in a small town where Jake’s sister Jennifer needs her job.

Fred snorts. “No. Ain’t none of my business, and hey, let me keep it professional here, you’re running the install on the house here for my client. Back in the Army, all my best bros had to work under DADT. Ain’t none of us who lived _ever_ picked up the dumb habit of asking nosey shit like that. But I don’t want anybody taking a misstep that might get somebody hurt, so I figure you need to know what might come blowing up outta nowhere round here. High school linebackers beatin’ up skinny little punks near gay bars in fuckin’ Springfield, call themselves some kinda big warriors like it was hard to do. People are sayin’ some really sorry shit, like, _‘hey it’s not good for those two to hang around with the kids of those poor women at the shelter, they might be kiddie molesters.’_ Ignorant little pills. And never mind they aren’t liftin’ a pious little finger themselves to help out those poor, poor women or their kids, neither. Heard secondhand there’s been some nasty comments from the new Catholic priest, who’s a real burn-in-hell conservative.”

Cougar squints up at Fred. “Since when did a _priest_ become so--” he waves one hand in frustration.

“Yeah, I know, so much like right-end Baptists, huh?” Fred agrees.

Cougar makes a face. “I was raised _católico,_ I was thinking of visiting maybe one of the charity meetings there, see how things are, visit a weekday mass, try small things.”

“Now I feel bad about warning you, like I’m stopping what coulda been some good stuff happening.”

“No,” Cougar says firmly, “I appreciate the warning. I will try quiet things, see how it goes. It will be on them if they discourage us from helping how we can.”

“Hey, somebody’s gonna need the help. If they don’t want it, their loss, let’s send it where it’ll do some good, huh? I’ll keep an ear out, give you a call if I hear somebody could use your help. You get on board a charity project like that, if you want help in my style of skillz, you got my number.”

Cougar looks up, astonished.

Fred holds out his big meaty hand.

Cougar shakes it firmly. “Thank you.”

“Hey, any time.” Fred nods at the wall. “That’s some nice patching. I guess you wouldn’t mind if I called you guys if I need some casual day labor, short notice, when I need guys I know can handle a saw.”

“Thank you. I would welcome the work, yes,” Cougar says.

“I know we aren’t making it easy to get settled in here, but folks here will put you to some testing even when they like you, first thing. People have got burned by some of the tourists, silly asses move in all starry-eyed and leave a mess when country living stops being fun and they don’t want to feed cows in the snow.”

Cougar makes a pained face. “We probably ought to run a power line for a heater in the coop, too. I hear storms get extreme long enough to go beyond battery heaters or the birds heating up the coop on their own.”

Fred nods, making a face. “Expensive darn birds, huh?”

“Jake’s niece--Jennifer’s daughter-- she carries them all around, talks to them like teddy bears. Jake will show you pictures even if you don’t ask.”

Fred starts to laugh again. “Oh man, I remember seeing her once with that service puppy doing tricks down by the ice cream place. Just put her through her paces, sweet as sugar.”

Cougar waves one hand in resignation, agreeing that the girls aren’t going to give up the chickens just because there’s snow coming. “We can put up some poles on anchor bases for that before you come out next time. Something braced up like those little windmills you see by the mailboxes, yes? How far apart?”

They talk about the slack that the line should have, and how far it has to run from the nearest possible tap from the house.

“Bad storm might knock down your poles too, but at least you can get your generator going while you repair things.” Fred thumps the air vent that Cougar built for the new generator. The shiny new generator sits on a new angle-iron anti-flood platform, near the basement steps, where it can be hooked into the main electrical box on the floor above. Fred starts up the steps, reaches for the inside basement door. “So what are you guys thinking about doing on the rest of the property?”

“We haven’t talked to Jennifer yet,” Cougar says.

“Nice lady, she talks to my ex all the time. Liz works checkout line at the store.” Fred shakes his head. “Tell you what, when I broke up with my last two girlfriends, Liz never let it die. She is still riding me about that. Every time I drop by the store, she gives me a hard time, reminds me she was right. Warned me about ‘em, and damn, was she on the money. It’s enough to put a guy off ever buying groceries again, I tell you.”

Cougar looks up into the man’s wry smile. “We will have to work with her and Jennifer, sit down and vet somebody decent for you.”

Fred laughs, surprised. “Well, hell, why not? I couldn’t do worse on my own, right? Matter of fact, I asked Jennifer out a couple times. She got to sit down for dinner at the nice Italian place once, but then every other time, I’ve been on call, or she’s been volunteering with local CPS liaison stuff, or the girl’s soccer team had something happen. Always some emergency thing we gotta go run and deal with.” He picks up the coffee mug he used earlier, drains the last of it with a happy sigh, and rinses it in the sink.

“Because you’re both good with emergencies,” Cougar says, rinsing out his own mug. “So maybe you need somebody who stays home, instead of going out running around the same way.”

“Stays home and worries, more likely,” Fred says. He pauses, opening the back door. “Well, I could stay and visit all day long, yarning away, but I got some other folks to yack their ear off today. Thanks for the coffee too, that was really nice. Let me know when you got stuff ready to go.”

Cougar is left standing on the porch watching the truck drive away, flexing his fingers against a slightly crushed sensation, and in his chest, a tight feeling. It’s an odd mix, apprehension roiling in an unreasonable warmth about how well things are going so far.

Cougar knows better than anyone how differently you can be treated when very tight, small communities don’t like you.

 


	14. Angels of the Apocalypse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seems like angels of this type aren't always neat and tidy and clean, either. Some of them come with distinctly raggedy clothes and smell a bit of cordite sometimes.  
> Warning for the usual Losers-style profanity. Also, Roque-lecture. If you're hearing the rolling roar of Idris Alba going off on folks, then my work here is done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to my beta-reader, cougars_catnip, catching the awkward bits I forget or leave out or which don't make sense.

Roque frowns at the Crenshaw melons disapprovingly. He spent enough time at bases in Southeast Asia to become a spoiled brat about ripeness when he’s paying his own hard cash money for produce. Things like tomatoes, papayas, melons, figs, peppers, peaches, mangos--by God, the man even knows how to use things like Japanese eggplant. And don’t get him going about greens beat up like a wino in an alley long before they aged past their sell-by date. That posting in rainy-hell Washington state made him a complete pill about salmon and craft-brew beer and coffee and nuts, too.

Cougar has the same kind of finicky cat-face going on over pickled stuff and cheeses and chocolate and hard liquor and tomato sauces. Between the two of them, either it’s a four hundred dollar checkout or nothing gets put in the grocery cart.

Tomato sauce, by God, who ever knew there was anything to critique? It comes in giant cans, you dump it in a pot with a vat-full of gummy pasta and blobs of pan-seared hamburger and throw bags of pre-shredded cheese on top, right? You’re a soldier doing mileage on your feet, you want tons of fat and carbohydrates, right?

No. Not in _his_ unit, no. Apparently they were all raised on balsamic vinegar by tiny shrill Italian grandmothers in the Old Country or something, in spite of the fact he’s spoken lately with Cougar’s mother--terrifying, how she can go on about Congressional hearings into immigration reform. Apparently she watches Spanish language public service stations all day long or something. She doesn’t waste time cooking at all, one of the grandkids does that for them. She doesn’t have to take notes, either. He told her she ought to be testifying with facts and figures, she’d be good at it. He knew when he said it that Cougar won’t thank him for that, it’s unleashing a monster. It’s perfectly clear where Cougar inherited his appallingly exact memory.

In the opposite direction, they all talk about Jenson, who can smell sugar from a mile away and has never met a weird candy or cereal from for’n parts, in the original language, that he won’t pine for later on, loudly. Apparently he jitters all of it off, or talks it all off, and not because Cougar used to drag him away from the computers and make him do agility drills, and of course Roque used to make him do CAPE all the time. It looks these days as if Cougar is getting him to run it off jogging, pacing all round downtown and out in the neighborhood where Jake’s sister lives.

Clay sighs, glances down at the old refrigerated case holding a minimal offering of greens. It’s a small town grocery store struggling just to import plastic-wrapped heads of iceberg lettuce, for crissakes. They’re not going to stock watercress or spinach or feta cheese dressings or funny-colored carrots, all that metrosexual shit. You’ll get ketchup and wieners, dammit, and you’ll be happy about it if you get some mustard and sliced pickles. Don’t ask what kind of pickles, _shut up._ That way lies madness. Just be grateful they are even _allowed_ to stock beer in this county.

Clay turns his head slightly at shouting from the front. Somebody’s getting unpleasant about somebody else’s friends being faggots, arguing about something with the checker. He glances up at Roque, who makes some vague gesture waving at the display in front of Clay.

Clay nods, puts a battered loose-leaf lettuce head into a plastic bag, and grabs an aging package of salad greens, the best he can do. Roque sent him over here to make the best of a bad situation. Yes, lettuce, and lots of it, is part of Roque’s training regime, not just the raw eggs and climbing stadium steps.

He can recite verbatim Roque’s entire lecture on managing your bowels with decent fiber content. This is important when you’re living on dumb salty shit like MREs for a month at a time. Gotta keep up your fiber when you can, or your entire system will turn into a giant knot, which is just the truth. Trust Roque to spend unit time talking about shit--literally, shit--rather than answer the damn question from the General about where he signed Clay’s name on insane forms to justify Jensen’s latest fit of exuberance on purchasing computer parts.

Clay blinks into the unflattering well-lit glare at Roque, who is scowling at stacks of generic beer. Really. There will be bitching about that, clearly. And lots of it about the retirement forms that Coulson gave him, which he immediately handed off to Roque, and which caused the predictable volcanic rumblings he has become so familiar with.

But no more of Jensen’s outrageous supply demands. Or Cougar’s. Or Pooch’s, either. It’s strange to realize all that is gone, in the past, old news. He doesn’t have to explain Jenson’s computer gear to CENTCOM budget guys or the NSA or JSOC or General fucking nosey Ross or anyone, any more. Cougar might find himself answering some strange damn questions from the Internet cops, if things between him and Jake are going the way it looks, but it’s all on the two of them now.

Clay is feeling a twinge of concern about that when the shouting gets louder.

“Oh fuckin’ hell,” Roque says, striding back to the cart with his hands full of bags. “Small town inbred motherfuckin’ pinheads.”

“You got the--”

“Yeah, yeah, Cougar said he was makin’ cheese sauce.” Roque holds up the smallish head of cauliflower.

“And the--”

“They didn’t have it.”

“Okay,” Clay says.

“Got your brand of rot, though.” Roque puts a ridiculous plastic bottle of bourbon in the cart, ignoring the pained look Clay gives him for that. Plastic, really? It looks like it was labeled for sale at a local casino but somehow ended up here instead.

Voices are rising at the front again. One of the checkers says firmly, “Folks, I’m going to ask you one more time to leave the store. Our employees are not required to listen to cursing and obscenities.”

“No shit,” Clay says, pushing the cart.

“Where the hell is the manager?” Roque snarls, craning his neck. Peacetime hasn’t made him more jittery, he’s actually calming down, bit by bit. But by comparison to civilians, he looks like a big dark bundle of raw force waiting to blow in any direction.

“In the back, working with an electrician,” Clay says. Of course he noticed; the doors were open, and he always checks for back exits in buildings when Roque is checking aisles at the front. It’s like checking for windows and opaque trash containers that could hide bombs--once you’ve experienced IEDs, it’s something you never grow out of.

Roque turns the corner into view of the caterwauling, and gives a snort.

The checker is twisting her arm out of the grip of some hellbilly with a scroungy beard and bad teeth. The guy is reaching his other hand across the cash register, mashing various keys on it awkwardly, and it looks like he’s either going for her blouse or her hair, or trying to reach into the jammed till, or something. Everybody else crowded in close is yelling and shoving. Some of them near the checkout stand are pushing grocery carts into one another.

Roque has stomped out a good long four strides closer, with Clay trotting close on his six, when the cashier puts two fingers in her mouth and gives a whistle that could stop a fire engine. She whips back her long black hair out of reach, and leans into the guy grabbing her wrist, and does it again, right in his face.

He flinches back, lets go of her forearm, and stumbles back into the people behind him, so hard that one of them at the back falls down. The stink of stale beer is pretty intense from them, Clay gets that hint first thing.

Then the hellbilly is up snarling at the cashier worse than before, waving a Bowie knife.

The cashier isn’t giving an inch. She’s an Asian gal, pretty little thing with a chalk-white oval face, and she’s completely ready to shove the heel of her hand into her assailant’s face if he doesn’t lay off. But none of the other store employees seem to be anywhere in sight. No box boys, no other checkers, and the line of people was way too long before, back when he and Roque walked into the place.

Weird, Clay thinks, and does the same finger-whistle that the girl did.

Then Roque is wading in, picking up people by the back of their jackets and pushing them away into open space, away from the grocery carts, but not too concerned if they stay on their feet or not.

Clay shoves another guy back before he can go jumping at Roque’s back. Clay and Roque have some experience with this stuff, but apparently so do some of the folks yelling and carrying on, and one of the skinny older women is still trying to grab at the girl.

Roque drags two of the men completely upward out of the narrow checkout line, legs kicking, knocking back the four aggressive women as well. Bench-pressing three hundred pounds is useful sometimes. He throws the men casually down in the nearest grocery aisle, where they crash into cans. Things fall on them. It looks a lot more painful than it does in all the action movies. Roque glares at the next two, nearest the checkout girl, and they back up hastily.

“That’s enough,” Clay says loudly. “What is going on here?”

Heads turn, people are still yelling, and there’s folks at the back who appear to be fighting one another. Then a big burly guy bursts through two of these fights, flinging people aside, and yells exactly the same thing. He’s wearing utility gear, clearly the electrician, come running up from the back of the store.

“What do you think you’re doing, you gonna get somebody seriously hurt here!” he roars, and he’s glaring at the locals, not at Roque or Clay. People give way as he starts moving in on them. “Christ, what set you guys off, you forgot your pizza coupons?”

There’s muttering.

“What?” Fred the electrician roars. “What is that you’re saying? What is that you’re saying about _my wife?”_

Silence. There’s some tinkling noises as something falls off a shelf and breaks.

The guy glares around, big hands opening and closing. “You got something to say about my clients, about my friends, about my wife, you can say it to my face.” He waits a moment, glowering, his broad face red as Santa Claus.

A thin dark older man looks up from the elbow-twist he’s put on the hellbilly who jumped the girl, holding him down on the floor. The older guy doesn’t seem to be having any trouble keeping a grip there, either. He has a raspy construction-site voice when he starts yelling at his neighbors. “You lot kept saying you were gonna go out and kill those faggots. We all heard it, you dumb shits. You told me to my face you were gonna start by beating up all their friends, kept yelling that at Liz. What the hell does she have to do with it? You’re just too chicken-ass to come talk to _me?_ Or talk to Fred here, when you don’t want us doing business with somebody? Just chickenshit about tackling it from the front, huh? Huh, is that it?”

It sets off a surge of angry yelling, and Clay does the whistle again. With Roque a few steps in front of him, hands out, it’s pretty clear which side Clay is on.

The guys in raggedy jackets pull back in front of the fallen soup cans, glaring at one another. They look like a bunch of bony junkyard dogs, and Clay feels sick looking at them. It’s clear where some of them have been making money. Crack or meth or some unholy combination has rotted out the front teeth on some of them, it’s that bad. Women have told Clay all the excuses-- the money is better than the burger place pays, it was a stopgap after the chain store cut their hours, or else their pimp at the truckstop gave it to them. This is what you get when too many people go hungry here at home.

Roque won’t hear that excuse, either. He just snarls that Clay ought to hang out with a better glass of sluts, God knows he can afford it instead of drinking it all. Well, the Losers are getting some income at least, not that good but it’s something, now that Coulson has sorted out a sorta kinda retainer for them to help out with the Avengers Initiative. No assignments as yet, Coulson says he’ll let them decompress for a month, maybe six weeks, he’ll get back to them. He’s got researchers hunting for proof about Max’s crimes and real identity. Thanked Clay for getting him in touch with Aisha.

By then, the electrician is growling again. “Yeah? Big brave guys gonna go get drunk off their asses and pick on an eighty-pound woman stuck out here by herself, and think everybody else is gonna just _watch_ you do it? Is that what you think?” He starts stalking down the line of people, glaring at each person. “Everybody’s just gonna sit there and put up with it?” He pauses, looking at a couple of the guys. “Yeah, Bob, you’re gonna want to get that cut looked at, get some stitches. It doesn’t look too bad, he’ll be fine, don’t worry, ma’am.”

Two of the scroungy guys snarl at him as Fred the electrician gets near them, and he just looks at them, looks at what appears to be a sprained ankle there. Fred nods at him. “You’ll need to get that looked at.” He moves on, and they keep saying stuff after him. Racist stuff this time, about banging Asian gals. Their noise seems to set off others, and a skinny woman in too much makeup speaks up, high and strained, saying it’s God’s will they should kill fags, Fred has been blinded by Satan and the love of money, his mistaken ideas are the fault of all those unnatural homosexuals spreading lies. She can’t possibly be as old as her leathery skin looks. _Cancer,_ Clay thinks. He knows that odd grayish tinge.

The new voice booming out into the store seems to surprise them.

Roque says, “Yeah, see, this is where _you_ ain’t a Christian. The Lord’s Carpenter would be sore ashamed of you for saying that, and you damn well _know_ it, lady. But then, that’s just _my_ opinion, and in this country, we _all_ got the right to have an _opinion.”_

HIs voice growls, low and deep and strange, loud enough to carry through the whole store and getting louder as he goes. He has a rhythm in the delivery that sounds like a Baptist preacher, ringing out in the store when it rises.

“This is not what I went and fought in fuckin’ _Iraq_ for. This _‘kill all the fags’_ thing you got going here? That is _not_ what I was defending when _we_ went to fucking _Afghanistan_ , when we went over there to defend _your_ dumb asses from terrorists and we got guys blown up with fucking IEDs. Guys losing body parts, getting blinded, doing 45 operations for _skin grafts,_ you dumbass _fuckers_ \--losing good guys, all those guys who came home in a fucking _box_ \-- turns out it was for campaigns-- it turns out, all that _blood_ was just to feed the egos of your fuckin’ lyin’ blowhard talk-radio haters you like _so much.”_

Roque’s a really big guy to start with, and he just seems to expand taller as he gets going.

“I did not go _there_ so I would have to come _home_ to put up with a bunch of _pussies_ who hit women and beat up _faggots.”_

Roque goes bass when he wants to terrify recruits. It works. “That’s the same dumb shit that the Taliban and all those fucking fundamentalist ragheads want to do to all our women, to _our_ faggots, to our goddamn _kids._ They want to kill _our faggots,_ and I am not having with that. Those are _my_ goddamn faggots, those are _Americans,_ those are not people I am _giving up_ to ignorant ragheads so those _fuckers_ can murder them and kick them around _the same way_ they kicked around the bodies of my _brothers,_ the bodies of _American soldiers_ killed in Mogadishu. You prolly _forgot that,_ didn’t you?”

He curls his lip, looking at them. “I ain’t forgot what those ignorant fundie fools got up to. But you-- _you_ let the very same kind of idjits _run the show_ round here, didn’t you? I am _damn_ sure not putting up with it here where we still have a goddamn democratic government and the fucking _rule of law,_ do you _understand?_ Do I make myself clear, you pathetic asswipes? Is it perfectly clear what is going to happen if you ever touch this lady again?” His arm stretches out, pointing at the cashier. He glares, waiting.

Fred the electrician moves up behind the cash register, touches the Asian lady lightly, and she stands up very tall, taking one precise step back into his hands, that’s all. She is not going to make a show of anything for these people who turned on her so suddenly.

Roque takes a step forward, glaring. There’s some head nods, hastily, when he sweeps that gaze over particular people.

He nods back. “Do you want me to recite _every_ part of _every gun_ in the inventory of this man’s military forces, before you are perfectly clear on _what you are messing with?_ ”

Heads shake, hastily.

He goes softer. “How about I recite the UN Charter of Human rights, and the Articles of War citing correct treatment of enemy combatants where we had to treat prisoners by the rules no matter how much we _hated_ their sorry starved asses?”

Everybody is just staring at him, and at the scar down his face. It has gone pale and that’s not a good sign with him. Even Clay finds himself gazing up, surprised, because Roque is practically vibrating with rage

Amazingly, many of the people at the back are still standing in a ragged line, clutching their grocery carts. That’s why the fighting was so awkward when people were falling into the carts.

Roque leans forward toward them, dark and scarred and glaring like all the angels of the Apocalypse. Softly, he says, “Do I make myself _understood,_ folks?”

Lots of head nods.

“Okay then,” Roque says, and he folds his arms.

Clay coughs, gives a wry face. “He’s not joking about the gun parts, just so you know. Umm, let’s make sure everybody’s okay, huh? Take a look at the person next to you, please. Fred, how’s the other folks back there? Does anybody else need medical attention?”

At the back of the line, Fred pauses in front of an older woman who is clutching a little string bag of stuff. She’s shaking gently in place, totally silent, staring up at him with gigantic pale eyes like a rabbit. Fred murmurs, “Miss Lewis, I am so sorry. Are you okay? Ma’am, let’s get you a chair, here.” He gestures, and one of the men from the back stops dabbing at a cut on his forehead and brings over a skinny iron cafe chair from the little deli counter area. Gently, the two men guide her into sitting down, and the man with the cut nods at the electrician that he’ll keep an eye on the old lady. It’s probably the best thing they could do for the man too, giving him something to do to keep him from going into shock with the head blow.

That’s the moment when the nearest store door opens and three people in dark uniforms step in at once, hands on their belts. Instantly they fan out, older woman in the center, stepping forward more slowly. She’s taking her time, looking over the situation. She clearly recognizes a lot of them, eyes flicking from one face to next.

At that moment, when Clay is distracted looking at the local law enforcement, is when the nearest of the drunk guys shoves him aside violently, elbowing past and running. The hellbilly’s cousin plunges toward the other side of the store, heading for the other set of doors. It’s not a big place, there’s only two sets of front doors.

He doesn’t make it that far because Roque picks up three grapefruits from the rubber checkout roller and bowls them side-arm between the guy’s feet, and he goes down, flailing.

“Think you can mess with _my people,”_ Roque growls.

“Sir, if you would--” one of the dark uniforms says to Roque, hands up placatingly.

The other deputy starts trotting toward the fallen drunk.

It’s distracting. Of course that’s when another of the drunken bunch breaks out of the gaggle of customers, streaks for that same door, knees pumping high.

The deputy already in motion just veers slightly, grabs, and takes the runner down, sprawling together onto the floor. The first deputy gets it in gear and heads over to round up the first guy just as he’s struggling up on his knees.

“Anybody else?” the older woman says. She has her hand on her taser holster, but she still hasn’t drawn it, nor her handgun. “Hey, go for it. I could just deputize these two guys and see what they do about it. Spec Ops, man, could be fun. Nothing like a new learning experience, huh?”

Roque turns, squints at her. “Are you for real?”

“Real as death and taxes, hon,” she says. “No? Nobody? Okay, folks, we got the paramedics on the way to take a look at those cuts and bruises. Me and my team were just over the lot at the Chicken Shack, just having supper, that’s how we got here so fast. Okay, if all you folks will just wait in line there, we’ll get some breathalyzers going. Seeing as one or another of you had to be driving, because I saw your cars in the lot out there, we’ll need to see if you’re able to drive safely before we can release you. No reason why the store can’t check out your groceries while you’re waiting, but I’m sorry about your ice cream if it takes awhile.”

Roque cuts a sharp look at Clay, who just shrugs. He had a shot or two of Jack, back a couple hours ago before they left the hotel room, so it’s been long enough it probably won’t show above a .005 now, if that. Also, the Sheriff’s logic seems a little skewed to him, considering none of this was a traffic stop. He’s not about to argue with her, though. He’s not up to quoting regulations about state highway law vs. inciting to riot and assault having different requirements to compel a breathalyzer test.

Two more deputies show up, one of them still tucking in her shirt, and a trio of paramedics, who get moving quickly through the crowd, always keeping an ear out for their radios.

The deputies move the two handcuffed guys outside; outstanding warrants must be involved there. Three other of the skinny squirrel-jawed meth clan start arguing with the Sheriff about showing their ID. Clay glances at that, then over at Roque, and tilts his chin.

Roque sighs, rolls his shoulders, and nods.

Clay strolls up to the line where the Sheriff is standing, being careful to move up behind the problem guys and not at her side or back where he might surprise her. “Is there a problem, Officer?”

“Not at all, but thanks,” she says briskly. “Ed, you can have that discussion with your attorney. In the meantime, either provide your ID or you can join your brother in the tank.”

Roque glances away, nods at Clay, jerks his chin away at the rest of the line. Then he stands near the knot of people arguing with the Sheriff, just waiting, as if he could wait all day.

Clay takes the Roque-chin suggestion and moves along the line, speaking to people, asking how they’re doing, asking if they need anything. There’s two sets of kids in there, for crying out loud. He hardly noticed them before, they’d kept so quiet. Now the older ones are jittering nervously when he comes close to their parents. The little ones are starting to whine and fuss, all tired and hungry. Their parents looked equally exhausted.

Behind the two sets of kids, there’s that older woman in too much makeup muttering some kind of conservative political stuff. Her three friends all just glare at him haughtily, indignant at the offer of chairs. Their demands to go outside and smoke are denied by a deputy.

Clay speaks to the paramedics, saying that if they need any water bottles purchased that he will cover that expense.

He speaks to Miss Lewis, watching the other folks while he listens to her, and he talks to her self-assigned caretaker, who has brought over another of the cafe chairs.

Clay estimates the time frame on getting people processed out of here. He calculates whether it might be a good idea to buy some food and drinks and pass it around, it might help create a lot better goodwill.

When he ranges back up to the cash register, he finds the Asian gal is steadily ringing up groceries, barely speaking to people and only in the most polite, distant terms. She looks better though, she has some color back in her cheeks, she’s not so dead-pale as earlier. Fred the electrician is standing nearby, looking a bit at a loss on what to do now. Fred nods at Clay once, gruffly utters thanks. When Clay offers to keep an eye on things up front, the big guy nods and clumps away back to the interrupted job at the back.

After a few watchful minutes, Clay says to the cashier, “Let me interrupt you a moment between customers, here. Liz, ma’am, would you mind ringing up a case of water, a box of those pop cans, one of the juice cans, a couple boxes of those Saltine crackers, a package of cheese slices and a sliced salami, and let’s see, two boxes of the animal cookies? We’ll pass those around while people are waiting, it might keep folks from getting so cranky.”

Liz looks at him sidewise a moment, gives a sharp nod, and she rings it up in a steady run of key taps without even referencing the numeric zebra codes. She takes Clay’s cash, counts out the change the same as for her other customers, and silently goes back to ringing up the next person. When the guy complains she is too slow, she just apologizes and states she is going as fast as she can. When the guy opens his mouth again to complain, he gets a long, cynical look from Clay. The guy shuts up and takes his receipt and grumps away to pass his sobriety test instead.

Clay glances up at Roque, nods toward the aisles. Roque swings out of his slouch, goes and picks up the items Clay specified in a cart, and starts at the back of the line passing out the drinks, then the food. It’s strange, but most of the people don’t seem to be afraid of Roque at all. Their faces light up and some of the guys reach out eagerly to shake hands with him, sharing their own units in the service. Women nod and speak to him, the little kids reach up to touch his sleeve. Some of the older women do too, holding on, some of them speaking in low voices, tearfully, and he pats their arms, nodding. Mothers who lost someone, no question there. Roque claims he never knows what to do with those ladies, but he seems to handle it just fine from where Clay is observing it. Strange part is all these service people in this store, not at some local base PX where it’d be cheaper. “How close is the nearest PX?” would be a useful question to ask, if he needs to open a conversation.

Standing at the checkout with Liz, Clay starts offering to bag groceries, speaking to folks, asking what they’re going to cook for dinner. When there’s a break in the line, waiting for folks busy with the deputies, Liz turns to Clay and says quietly, “Thank you.”

“Oh, my pleasure. Keep busy, right, it makes the day go faster.”

She nods once, glancing around her register. She doesn’t seem able to stop moving. She steps around him and starts restocking bags from the next register over, then she’s wiping clean the weight pan and the rubber roller and the counter and taking particular care about the glass over the laser barcode scanner. Speaking to the machine, her voice is so soft he almost misses the words. “I meant, please, thank you for helping us in the fighting too.”

“Same thing, keeping busy,” Clay says, with a grin and a shrug.

Liz tilts up a skeptical eyebrow, which reminds him completely of Cougar.

“So Fred’s your husband?” Clay says, watching some of the drunk guys failing their breathalyzers.

She shakes her head. “Ex. We got married when he was stationed in Guam.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry to bring up a sore spot--”

“Fred is a great guy, you know, Fred is everybody’s buddy, Fred always has time for other folks. But he has no time left over at home for--for _anything_ else--” Liz lifts both her hands in a helpless, what-can-you-say gesture.

Clay nods. “Cobbler’s kids got no shoes.”

She ducks her head and keeps tidying things shoved in haste around her cash register.

“Yeah. Hey, where is everybody else? Where’s your coworkers?” Clay asks.

“They refused to come on shift with me this morning,” Liz says, chin down, cleaning the shelf around the cash register. Her English is careful, precise.

“And the manager allowed it?”

“He fired them all for it,” Liz says, and tosses her hair back, reclips the mother-of-pearl pins that hold it back. “He’s new, from corporate in Chicago. He is a very nice man and he won’t allow people behaving like that. He says-- he said-- if they can’t manage to behave like professionals, there’s lots of other people in town who need the work.”

“Wow,” Clay says.

“He’s the shorter gentleman talking to Miss Lewis, he got a cut on his forehead trying to keep people from knocking her over. He wouldn’t let her pay for anything, he says it is on the store, and she is not allowed to worry about it.”

Miss Lewis is showing the gentleman something she’s been knitting. Apparently her shopping bag holds all kinds of things, not just groceries.

At least by then the arguing drunks have been dealt with. Apparently three of the deputies are outside standing guard, because the remaining deputies are administering sobriety tests. People are a little more relaxed as they speak to the Sheriff and get passed along to one of the deputies as space opens up among the lines.

At a glance from the Sheriff, Clay says, “No rush. We don’t have any ice cream, we can wait.”

She just nods. “No good deed goes unpunished, huh?”

Clay snorts, and sips from a juice can. It certainly won’t hurt to give his liver another hour to take the edge of the earlier shots he had, either. The Sheriff probably knows that too, come to think.

The Sheriff nods at the cashier. “You doing all right? Need anything?”

The cashier shakes her head, looks away, her whole body stiff.

The Sheriff gives a little sigh, nods at Clay, and moves back to her deputies.

Liz says flatly, “Most days they just can’t get here in time if somebody robs us.”

Clay folds his arms, studying the watchful cashier. “So when are you off shift, Liz? I think my buddy Roque and I would like to take you to dinner, if there’s any place open, and see you home safe. You got your car waiting out there?”

She shakes her head, turns aside sharply. It’s hard to hear her when she says, “Just the bus. My car broke down last week. Somebody-- somebody hit me at the stoplight, the engine has-- has--” She puts one hand tightly over her mouth and nose, blinking hard.

Clay doesn’t touch her. He just puts out one hand toward her, palm open. “Ahh, don’t tell me, you’re tired. Food can just be fast food or takeout or something, right? We’d like to do that, it’d make _us_ feel better. Really, Liz, not kidding you.”

Liz tilts her chin down, fingertips gripping white on her face.

Clay says, “Get out your trashcan. Lean here, don’t fight it, let it happen. It’s okay. Just shock, completely normal. Yeah, Roque, one of the water bottles-- yeah, a chair would be good too. Thanks, man. Okay, Liz, you’re good. We’re right here. Easy, now. Just ease down onto the chair. Can I touch your arm, are you okay with that? Okay.”

Roque grabs some paper towels from somewhere, passes them to Clay.

“Hey, hey, it’s fine, no big deal here. Like the Sheriff said, Spec Ops means never apologizing when you gotta baptize the trash can, right?”

Roque snorts. “And that’s just this week.”

“You’re killin’ me here, bro,” Clay says to him, shaking his head. He pats Liz lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t even worry about it. It’s all good.”

“Tell her about that time you delivered a baby in the street in Cebu,” Roque says.

“Hey, it wasn’t just me. Cougar did the actual bit with the gloves, got the baby turned.”

“Really?” The cashier’s voice is hoarse, thready. Once she’s wiped her face and taken a small sip of water, she just looks cold and exhausted. “What were you doing in Cebu?”

“Ahh, now, that would be telling,” Clay says, and ventures to put his arm around her shoulders, steadying her.

She gives Roque a long considering look, tilts her head in Clay’s direction, and asks the big guy, “How crazy is he?”

“Pretty damn crazy,” Roque says, folding his arms and leaning against the checkout stand.

“Oh,” she says, and looks sidewise at Clay. “I thought so.”

“Hey, what’s with outing me on the crazy, huh?” Clay says.

Roque shrugs one shoulder. “‘S just the truth, man.”

“Yeah,” Liz says, pushing hair back out of her eyes. “It’s okay, I’m used to it. I only get the lunatics. I just wonder why sometimes, you know?”

“Hey, hey,” Clay says, rebuking her, and puts both hands up to her cheeks, and pulls out the hair pins, smooths back her hair, and repins them for her the same way he’d redo it for Jensen’s niece Beth. “Just shows you got really good taste in righteous guys, yeah?”

There’s the look again: Cougar-style disbelief. _Bodes well,_ Clay thinks, smiling at her. Because he _knows_ how awesome Cougar is, and this gal certainly has a hell of a memory for barcodes.

Liz’s sardonic gaze slides past him over to Roque.

Roque meets her skeptical eyes, snorts, rolls his eyes, and shakes his head. “Okay, yeah, put a fork in it, Clay, we’re done.” He points at the cashier. “You, missy, we’re gonna pour in some coffee and tell some really bad jokes until you’re ready to go home.”

Liz stares bleakly past both of them. She’s staring at the front doors. “They know where I live. Two of those guys followed me home...last week… I hate that noise when you kick somebody and their teeth kind of…” Her fingers make a gesture like she’s crumbling a cookie. “I’ve got to testify in a month…”

“Yeah,” Roque says. “Yeah.”

“They just never... stop.”

Roque grunts, and Clay gives him a raised eyebrow.

Roque says, “Hotel is good too, when you got company next door.”

Clay agrees. “Or we could drive you to Jennifer’s, set it up watch and watch with Jake and Cougar, if you think the hellbillies will get up to some really dumbass ideas. You’ll want to kill Jake in two hours and you’ll never hear Cougar, but you won’t mind. Really, you won’t. I mean, he’s the medic, you know, with the baby-delivering gloves and awesome.”

“That’s ridiculous-- that’s completely-- ridiculous--” Liz seems to be losing her English.

Clay says softly, “Yeah, well, Roque said earlier, right, we didn’t spend time over in the sandbox to let ‘em do it here at home. And let’s just see if the Sheriff is serious about deputizing a coupla retired soldiers getting a bit stiff in the back, bitchin’ about their arthritis, huh?”

Roque snorts. “C’mon, this is nuthin’ compared to shit we handled all over Africa. Coupla dozen white supremacists with a meth cooking operation that old and out of date? Jeez, throw in a match, how hard would it be?”

“Ahh, you just like to blow shit up,” Clay says.

“And maybe some white supremacists,” Roque says.

“Naaah, you’d never do that. They’d die too easy.”

Liz just groans into one hand, and by then, neither of them take it as a sign that she’s going to be sick again.

Roque points at Clay. “You, you’re being ridiculous. You think you’re doing community policing when you only pare it down to an Uzi in either hand. C’mon, _tazers?_ Tazers, that’s what they’re using here?”

“Hey, could be a new learning experience for us all,” Clay snarks right back.

“The grapefruits were good,” Liz says, perfectly straight-faced.

“Yeah,” Roque says, puffing up a little. “Yeah, I thought so. And no collateral blast damage or anything.”

Liz closes her eyes for a moment, leans her face down in her hands, and lets Clay hug her. But when she emerges from her hands, what she says is, “God, the Seven Samurai are in town and we’re all gonna get shot.”

“ _We_ only need five,” Roque says.

“Six, we got Aisha coming down this week,” Clay says.

“Really?” Roque whines. He doesn’t like the woman. She out-machos him too much sometimes, which is just scary to watch anyway. “Well, eight if you count the unofficial auxiliaries. You better not be counting out Jennifer or Jolene, you’ll be sorry. They’d know where to find the best katanas anyway.”

Clay sighs. “Swords are _so_ last week.”

Roque snorts. “Jake’s warped your brain.”

Liz shakes her head. “God, it’s a videogame, I knew it. Where’s the evil warlord?”

“Oh, we got that covered too. Trust us.”


	15. Not So Silent Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not the most touchy-feelie of guys, the Losers.  
> And these ladies aren't the kind who become instant buddies with anybody.  
> Or the kind who engage in speculation on their concerns with anybody.  
> However, apparently you can't stop the Awesome, especially on a cold night with a whole worried mob of folks stuffed into the Jensen house.

 Jennifer Jensen’s house is ridiculously small for this many adults of perfectly normal size. When you get guys the size of Roque and Jake--and Jake’s computer gear, a bigger entity than any one person--sprawling out all over, it’s completely impractical. They’ve got the Pooch and his wife Jolene and the baby bunking down in Jake’s bedroom, with Jake and Cougar and Jake’s niece Beth sacked out on the living room floor, Steve and Clint in Beth’s tiny little room, and Roque and Clay in bedrolls on the kitchen floor, because that kitchen door is a dead loss security-wise. In total defiance of that reasoning, they’ve tucked Liz the store cashier between them, and it’s unclear whether Clay wants to send her to a decent college as if she’s his daughter, or play boyfriend as long as she’s willing to tolerate his bullshit. Roque is just protective, fierce as any beta wolf to protect his alphas, when he’s not snarling and challenging Clay himself. It’s unclear how Clay is handling him, but it seems to be working. He just smiles at Roque with that stupid grin, and Roque growls and shifts to some other topic until Clay gives him something to do, like checking perimeter or helping the Pooch with fixing Liz’s defunct old car or buying more blankets and folding chairs and food staples in town. Roque is coordinating night watches outside among the men, leaving the competent women soldiers to prowl the house when they’re restless--and they are. None of the women are used to so many bodies packed to the rafters.

The Losers seem to be fine with it. Clay doesn’t mind the cramped conditions at all, he says it’s better than a lot of the safe houses they’ve used in places like South America or Africa. Jake adds, with a laugh, that hey, it has a toilet, and even hot water sometimes.

It’s perfectly clear to Aisha that this isn’t what Clay grew up with. Maybe he’s more comfortable with this crowded country shack stuff because it’s about as far as you can get away from his family’s chilly acreages of Louis Quatorze chairs and mirrors. Amazing, there were mirrors everywhere, a vicious poke in the vanity wherever she looked. That surprised her. In all their PR snaps, the family all look as if they shouldn’t show up in shiny surfaces. Clay’s certainly got the coloring, the black hair and thick white-as-a-vampire skin. What he doesn’t have is their fifteenth-century attitude about the peasants.

He got better, he says, grinning. He claims he finally grew up by knocking around the world with all sorts of rascals in the Army--grinning at his extremely motley bunch-- but that isn’t the whole truth. The records say he got in trouble defending motley sorts from the very start, way back at his earliest prep school. Apparently nobody’s managed to beat it out of him along the way, try as they might. The only time he visited the family manse in the last ten years, he took the whole team with him, probably with advance warning they’d be needed. They ended up saving a bunch of local folks there when somebody firebombed the stables and the cottages and bunkhouses for the help. The family haven’t invited him back since, although some of the local folks got him to come to events in other towns nearby.

The stubborn streak, yes, that’s very true to breed. Aisha has run up against that a few times since she recruited him to work on bringing down goddamned Max. He ought to be able to anticipate which way Max will jump, he’s from the same class and age as Max, and distantly related. She checked on all that family shit when she visited DC and met up with Martina Alvarez, Cougar’s sister. Martina came on board via SHIELD’s allies among the Saudis, and she’s perfectly comfortable in a party dress amongst the acres of mirrors, but she’s just as comfortable living in the field. The Losers all agree that she taught Cougar how to survive out in the deeper parts of the erg, and that expertise kept the team alive a couple of times there in Africa.

There are no words for how awesome Cougar’s sister is. She has the sniper beat on the whole photographic memory thing and she’s much better socialized, better skilled at picking her battles. She’s acidly funny about upbraiding people when she catches them in lies or misreporting or gaps in recall on what really happened, and she sees that going on _all the time._ She’s also a lot quicker to pull blades to make her point with assholes who aren’t getting with the program, too, even amongst their own mirrors.

If Aisha wasn’t infatuated with her before, the second time she dealt with some of Ross’s goons trying to sneak up by the chicken coop would do it. The goons weren’t in any shape to argue when she handed them off to the local Sheriff. Sweet as pie, smiling, she told the LEO that it was nothing much, she was just practicing with Cougar’s borrowed slingshot when she saw them belly-crawling up at the house with their stupid plastic room-brooms. Says she thought they were from one of the local meth gangs, not honest-to-God soldiers in some black ops embarrassing debacle that nobody wants to explain. And of course, short-range, once she was out of slingshot pellets she just naturally started pulling her knives. What’s a girl to do? She wouldn’t want to offend local gun laws, after all. That made the Sheriff chuckle, anyway, and refuse the offer of the slingshot for ballistic examination.

Then Martina offered to give the slingshot back to Cougar.

Cougar told her to keep it. Apparently he’d picked up sticks from the hickory tree down by the neighbor’s cows to make more slingshots. He’s been whittling on his sticks while everybody else talks. Apparently he intends to give them away to the shooters in the group as silent weapons, which Aisha can get behind, but the man is too silent himself. He just isn’t into public conversations, especially not where the Sheriff can watch it.

If he’s said anything much to his sister, it was out away from the house, and nobody else has heard it. Aisha has seen the siblings trade quick gestures in American Sign, just small, automatic things like, “Good coffee,” and “thanks,” and “I didn’t know that.” Apparently you have to watch Cougar for awhile, see how his body language is going, to have a conversation with him, and he evaporates from the room whenever Aisha is there talking to Clay. He certainly hasn’t been lingering anywhere that Aisha could observe him.

The rest of that bunch talk all over each other, so there’s not much space for hearing yourself think. Roque has plenty to say to Aisha, all of it prickly with defensiveness about the Losers failing to take down Max physically themselves. She told him they did more than anyone else to bring Max to his ultimate downfall, it’d be foolish to eliminate him now when federal authorities may discredit Max’s whole network. She told him the Losers can just keep the money. But Roque doesn’t believe her, doesn’t trust she meant it. Man’s got quite a thing about money, which she warned him will slow him down at some crucial point one of these days, maybe get him killed. He puffed up all huge and mean, but she just looked him in the eye, and Martina spoke up lazily that Aisha was probably right about that. Roque just turned around and marched outside. After awhile they heard him banging away. He spent a couple hours chopping a bunch of firewood, muttering about storms and power failures and lousy leaky fireplace flues.

When Natasha and Martina ask her about it, Aisha confirms she’s pleased at what’s been happening about Max. Exposing Max’s operations to SHIELD as a breach of national security will hurt the silly bastard more than any of them could have done alone. Col. Fury clearly has the political chops to follow the evidence wherever it goes, he can make it priority enough to get somebody’s complete attention.

Aisha didn’t even need the reassurance of hanging out with Natasha--she’s heard some nice things about Coulson as investigative bulldog before this--but she’ll take it anyway. Just listening to Nat trading quips with Clint and Steve is a hoot. The Russian has a lovely sense of humor, like her taste in coffee--dark and bitter and sugared into savage intensity, the kind that is poured from _cezve_ pots in Moscow and Odessa.

Natasha’s briefing comments, sharing the latest research on each of Jennifer’s neighbors, really improved the day. So did Jennifer’s comments on her experiences with folks such as the local English teacher and her gossipy husband.

Seriously, there are cows down the road. Jennifer has a chicken coop. Seems to think it’s a luxury, getting fresh eggs, but then she lived rough back before Jake enlisted, back when she didn’t have bupkis to live on and could barely feed Beth. She has some hair-raising tales about short-order cooking and school teaching, stories that come out when it’s getting late and she’s tired and apparently losing her brain filters, and her hyper daughter is finally asleep.

She’s more like her brother, motormouth Jake, than it appears on surface meeting. She’s uncertain sometimes about social interactions she might have misread. When Jennifer asks for advice on dealing with rude rural folks who ought to be taken out back for some lessons in manners, at the very least, the whole group snorts.

No, Natasha tells her, they’re just assholes.

Martina agrees they ought to be shot on sight, and Aisha offers to stand backup, and it’s really nice to know they’d all come through on that one without even breaking a sweat.

“Hell, let me get my bitch boots on, that’s all,” Natasha says.

“How come?” Aisha asks, pushing aside her own thick para-style boots from digging into her side.

Martina says, “It’s the heels, yeah? Good for everything except rolling a ciggie in the rain.”

Natasha sniffs. “Keep the boy for that.”

“Oh? Thought he was for decorative?”

“Mmm. You need one sometimes for decent cross-shooting at black tie events.” Natasha waves one hand.

“You do?” Jennifer says wistfully.

“You get to borrow my little brother,” Martina assures her. “I mean, he’s a decent shot. You have to twist his arm to get him into formal wear, but--” she shrugs, reaching for her mug of tea and refreshing it.

“Yeeaaaah, he must clean up nice,” Jennifer says, as if she too appreciates Jake’s taste in men.

“Mm, he does,” Natasha murmurs. “Put him in a suit and you get the snooty-nosed lace cuff Hidalgo with this annoying little Casttthhillian _lisp,_ no less.” She points a warning finger at Martina. “Don’t pinch me, you. A gal can appreciate the shiny without mashing all the Christmas wrapping paper.”

Martina snorts. “That? _That_ never was shiny, sorry, don’t care how fancy he can fake it. _That_ went straight from high school acne to obstacle course gumbo. _That_ never met a pile of dirt without crawling through it. You know those Peanuts cartoons where the dog, the Snoopy, he is crawling low as a worm on rocks and bushes with his nose hanging down? That was my weird little brother. He was born half-lizard, I swear, _dios mio._ Back then he ran with coyotes, always came home with burrs in his hair. Wasn’t like it is now, where people keep better track, hovering over their kids. He’d disappear for two-three days at a time, come back with rabbits and snakes and lizards and armadillos and any shit he could catch, give it to my mother to cook. He shot a razorback dead, ninety-degree shot into the center of the skull with a twenty-two, when he was _eight,_ because he was out there in the brush fooling around by himself, got caught by a bunch of these aggressive pigs. Then he dragged it into the house to cut up the carcass, weighed more than he did. Made a helluva mess. Cried when we wouldn’t let him eat it, filthy thing was full of parasites. Man, you should have heard my mother going off about some damn fool ever giving a twenty-two to him.”

“But somebody was onto a good thing there,” Jennifer says mildly, and the rest of them snort.

“It was the damn slingshot gave them that idea. When he turned seventeen he broke some kid’s jaw with it, ran off and signed up to join the Army. Same night, he grabbed my dad’s car, drove out and broke into the local pound and rescued a bunch of dogs scheduled to get euthanized. Took them out running at my uncle’s place, scared hell out of the aunt-by-marriage, and got my uncle to promise to train them up to be good for something around cattle, because he was leaving and my uncle wouldn’t have his help in the fall. Made a complete mess of the car, of course. Then he was just gone, for four years he didn’t even come home when he had leave, until he lost that team in Korea. He only came home then because they made him do some kind of Army rehab program for six months, and they finally gave up, that stuff just made him more feral. He wouldn’t talk to anybody but those dogs at my uncle’s place, he’d just disappear if you chased him down. You had to sit under a goddamn tree and wait for him to come up and let you see him. Snot-nosed little shit, never telling me what he was getting himself into.”

“I hear you,” Jennifer says, with a sigh, and sips at her tea. The others are laughing, gently, because she’s already told some choice bits about Jake’s stunts. It’s not lost on any of them that those stories also centered around wrangling food to eat, a warm place to shelter.

The room is warming up, finally, so the steam isn’t visible from all their mugs, just from the kettle on its heating stand. Nat brought that with her, claiming she wouldn’t stay unless she had hot tea on demand. Martina promptly unpacked a massive bag of black loose leaf tea, laughing. People tend to make things happen to satisfy Nat’s demands, it’s a beautiful thing.

Aisha only hears this stuff because Martina and Aisha and Natasha are bunking on the floor in Jennifer’s bedroom. The four of them shower by turns and play card games and drink gallons of the mint tea that Martina says she bought in Barcelona. Aisha told them that tea probably came straight from Morocco, without inspection, so make sure to use the boiling water when they drink it. Everybody starts telling those stories about giardia and spitting camels and four-foot Siberian icicles and how to scrounge for fires in a homeless camp, and other hazards of life in the field.

They watch ridiculous action movies on one of Jake’s hand-me-down computer setups and tell stories that’d curl your toenails if it hadn’t happened to you for real, and laugh a lot. Martina only mentions having a wife in the past tense, and nobody asks her for more details. Nobody asks Jennifer what she’s eventually got to do about going back to work, either. Not when they’ve still waiting for more of General Ross’s stupid goons to come crawling through the iced-over burrs and foxtails out by the chicken coop. _Again_.

It’s Jennifer who finally brings it up. “Does anybody even know what Ross’s soldiers were _doing_ out here? I mean, did Ross really think it would do any good to kidnap somebody and try to get Jake to hack stuff for them, or something? Like Jake’s just gonna do whatever they want, or something?”

Martina cracks up, pointing at Jennifer. “Yeah right!”

Nat snorts.

Jennifer nods. “Forget dealing in the devil, just a question how Jake’s gonna twist his way out of it and make it bite them right on the ass.”

Aisha says, “Ross shoulda learned that much from briefings, it’s not like he could miss the history those guys piled up before Jake, and then there’s the records once Jake came on board. It’s fun reading, believe me. I didn’t know you could _do_ that with a Zodiac raft and a tank of nitrous.”

“Wasn’t that the Pooch going way off the reservation?” Nat asks.

“Yep, it was,” Aisha says.

“So yeah, it’s not just Jake or my little brother, it’s all of ‘em, the crazy fuckers.” Martina sips tea, and sighs happily over it.

“Pooch didn’t _tell_ me about that one,” Jennifer says. “Makes me want to check with Jolene.”

Aisha snorts. “He sure wouldn’t tell her, she’d clobber his sorry ass for that one.”

“Probably classified anyway,” Martina says.

“Learn something every day,” Nat says dryly.

“No kidding.”

“Then what does Ross _want?”_ Jennifer growls.

“Now there’s an excellent question.”

“Good guess if Ross himself even knows that,” Nat says.

“Oh, has he seemed a little confused to you ladies, too? I mean, more so than usual, since Max has been whispering sweet nothings in his ear?” Martina pours more tea, sips it, sets it aside.

Aisha snorts. “Spitting foam, ranting. Just sounded like senility to me.”

Nat lifts an elegant red eyebrow. “No. He always sounded that way.”

Aisha makes the noise that goes with her disgusted expression.

“Let’s be fair, you know he’s been flailing a bit since he lost his last mad scientist in one of those Skrull raids,” Martina says, adopting a yoga pose and stretching her toes. “Last I heard, the scientist has been popping up on surveillance networks in Macao, happy as a clam working on cloning some _Homo floresiensis_ DNA they stole from that island dig. You know, the dwarf people. Not sure where that’s going to take the Skrull on super soldiers, but he’s happy.”

“It was supposed to take them in big fat circles,” Nat says.

“Oh, okay,” Martina says.

“There was a plan?” Aisha says.

“There was, and the scientist has been obsessing on his new project so much that Ross’s old Supersoldier serum genetics deal isn’t even in his back file folders any more,” Nat says. “We checked.”

“Oh, good, so we’ll get to fight teeny tiny supersoldiers,” Aisha says dryly.

“Who do what they’re told, don’t forget,” Martina adds, putting her arms up in a complicated twist and leaning sidewise and then backward, stretching out her back.

“Yeah, because blind obedience is totally one of those big Skrull things,” Aisha says, straight-faced.

“Kinda backfires on them a lot, I notice. Not big on improv in the field.” Nat yawns.

“Yeah,” Aisha agrees, grinning. “Great on stockpiling shit you can steal, too.”

Martina points at her. “You are an evil, evil child and I totally approve.”

“Good,” Aisha says.

“So was there any further plan about _Ross?”_ Jennifer asks.

“The loss of his pet Igor was supposed to slow him down more than it has,” Nat says.

“Well, damn.”

“Seconding that, or I’d be mooching around in Paris moping about what is the proper haut couture gift to get one’s ex-wife when one is not speaking to them,” Martina says.

“Is one obligated to give gifts when not on speaking terms?” Nat asks, frowning at her nails.

“If one ever claimed to be a classy broad, yes,” Martina says. “Or a spoilt brat who sells her highly-trained delicately tuned, AKA completely _wrecked_ bod, for a nice income, and is rude about pointing out the money. Or if one is yielding to temptation to get in one last little dig about… various things.”

“Hmm, is one asking advice?”

“Hell yes, one is,” Martina says cheerfully, twisting around in a different direction.

“Classic wool coat tailored just a hair too small,” Aisha says promptly. “Just because they’re civilian. If they were mercenaries or soldiers or shit, then do it up in leather.”

“You’re just meaner than a junkyard daaaawg,” Jennifer drawls it out.

“Why, thank you,” Aisha says.

“Perfume?” Nat says. “Are we talking, say, invoking a paralyzing nostalgia for what once was? Many subtleties are possible with that.”

“ _Dios,_ never break up with a Russian,” Martina says, and Nat just _smiles._

“Wrap the perfume in the coat, they’ll never get rid of the scent,” Jennifer says.

“Never break up with a Midwesterner either,” Aisha says dryly, and Martina hums agreement.

Jennifer shifts restlessly in her blankets. “So what got Ross to break out the old files on-- on whatever he’s trying to do here?”

Nat says, “Ross’s games are all about supersoldier stuff. The genetics projects, for sure. One time I told him, _‘sorry about your penis_.”

Over the bubble of laughter, Jennifer exclaims, “Did you really?”

Nat shrugs. “It’s not like he’d ever become a reliable ally. And yes, cheap shot, but as a perfect distraction, it worked. One has a certain reputation to maintain.”

Martina grunts over her straight legs, stretching out her hamstrings along the blankets. “Hard part is deciding how showy to be. Calibrate it right, you’ll prevent a lot of silly business later.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing how much shit just _goes away_ if I show up with Steve asking questions,” Nat says.

There are chuckles.

“But everyone _likes_ Steve, right?” Jennifer says in a fake innocent voice.

“Mmm, and a lot of these folks, they like him in that _special_ way Ross likes him,” Martina says in a tone dripping with innuendo. “Or the way they’re _interested_ in you, Jennifer. Or Jake. Or your daughter.”

“Huh?” Jennifer says.

Martina says, “Didn’t anybody tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Jennifer asks.

“You’re Jake’s full sister,” Nat says. “You remember Bruce called and told you, from the cheek swabs you gave him after the picnic, right?”

“Yeah? Why does that--”

“Jake’s clearly a son or grandson of Steve Rogers. The test results say he’s a direct son, which is bizarre timewise. You’re his full sibling, also Steve’s child. Your girl Beth is a granddaughter. Bruce said he wondered if there were old World War II samples diverted and misused by somebody in Ross’s labs twenty, thirty years ago, because that was a long time before Steve was rescued from the ice.” Nat sips tea calmly.

“You mean my-- our-- mother was-- artificially inseminated. More than once,” Jennifer says.

“Very likely multiple times, yes. And it’s possible they weren’t just inseminating, perhaps they were implanting fertilized eggs from another woman. Tests from cousins on her side suggest that line is unrelated, so perhaps she carried you but she wasn’t your direct genetic mother.”

“Why? Why would she-- then why did they want _her?”_

“That’s what we’d like to find out too, if the records haven’t been destroyed by now. She had medical records of carrying an earlier baby as a surrogate or donor mother six years before she got married and had you. If she was a surrogate, then she went through hormone treatment for IVF. The hormone treatment was a rough process then, it would have been hard to keep it secret. It’s still fairly demanding on the patients. Timewise, it was well within the forward edge of research.”

“So… Jake and I… we’ve got another half-sibling out there somewhere?”

“We just have the record of live birth, and that she gave the baby up. Also, that child might be a full sibling to you and Jake, not just half. That success might be why she was selected, or it might have been an earlier attempt by Ross’s program before it went underground into some black ops secret budget. They might have used other surrogate mothers and donor mothers too, we’re still looking. It’s unclear why Ross apparently lost interest about the time Jake was born.”

“And that worries you?” Jennifer says.

“His motives were unclear, yes.”

“ _Are_ unclear,” Aisha emphasizes.

“Thawing out Capsicle probably revived a lot of Ross’s old ambitions. We’re pretty sure what his political ambitions would turn into if he extracted any major benefits from the serum.” Nat sips more tea, frowning.

“He’d sell it indiscriminately on the arms market,” Aisha says flatly.

“Eventually, of course. His first uses would depend entirely on what his labs could pull out easily, quickly.”

Aisha grunts. “Or what he can persuade people to _believe_ they got.”

“You have _such_ an evil nasty mind,” Nat says, approvingly.

Martina says, “With the kind of people you see working for Ross, I’d bet first on a rogue technician running away with the good stuff, and then let the games begin. Only God She knows where they’d end up. It’d look like a bunch of butter-fingered ball players fumbling all over.”

“That’s what everybody’s afraid of,” Nat agrees. “My sense of it, from Bruce, is the serum must be like a two-part epoxy. Nobody has the second half of it. You can look at what the combination did to Steve’s genetics if you compare it to his family members, but that’s old news, has been for years. Jennifer, I’m sure Ross got samples from you and your daughter and from Jake without any of you knowing.”

“Sample for hair in your car, as a start. Easy, no fuss,” Aisha says.

Jennifer makes a face.

“Much better than the alternatives, ladies! Amplify the signal in the lab with new methods these days, no need to bother more with the subjects themselves,” Martina says.

Nat goes on, “But there’s still a lot of guesswork about the order of genetic changes, and which choice of chemical effects were used to make any given change. Some of the same changes also show up in Bruce’s gamma radiation case, which is another reason Ross has been interested in _him._ But Ross probably had all those samples for years. It doesn’t explain what woke him up.”

“Max,” Aisha says.

“He’s probably known Max for years, they run in the same neofascist circles,” Nat objects.

“Okay, so let’s analyze it from the other end. Why did Ross _stop_ working on it for awhile?” Jennifer asks.

Nat gives a hum of approval.

Martina reaches for her tea, sips, and suggests, “Possibly Ross just shoved the project into a back file folder until Steve’s direct children grew up. Ross makes ridiculous public remarks as if he thinks children are something that just happen somewhere else, like frogs in the weeds, in no need of regular attention and support.”

“That’s certainly how Jake and I grew up,” Jennifer says calmly.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Aisha adds.

“Yeah, but that’s stupid too. Neglect doesn’t incline you to grow up into a trusting, docile little soldier, does it?” Jennifer rolls onto her side and sighs again.

Nat murmurs agreement into her mug, holding it close to her nose and breathing in the steam.

Martina says, “Possibly Ross had to lay low for quite awhile with unfriendly politicians in control of Congress and the Joint Chiefs who weren’t gonna get bullied into funding blue sky long-term genetic stuff just because he said so.”

Nat points a forefinger at Martina. “That I can see, yes. There’s some interesting hearing transcripts where they shut down a few counter-espionage operations during that time. Nothing proven, but Ross was implicated in a bunch of illegal black ops experiments besides those on Banner. Ross tried to get thawed-out Steve reassigned to him, but Fury was way too quick for that. Ross wants lots of troops, a whole bunch of super soldiers, not just this one amazing guy who won’t do what Ross orders, or the nice Dr. Banner guy who runs away to India rather than Hulk out on command.” Nat drinks some more tea.

Jennifer is frowning. “But they’re all going to be like that. They’re not going to march on command just because Ross says so. Have you _met_ Jake? Or my daughter?”

“Or you,” Nat says, smiling.

“Why, thank you, ma’am,” Jennifer says, but she’s rolling onto her back again, frowning up at the ceiling.

“Jake found that some funding for Max’s recent physics projects came from Ross’s black budget arm,” Aisha says.

“Oh God, we can’t forget about tracing back history on that nutbar either,” Jennifer says, flinging out her arms on top of the covers on her bed. She’s a big woman, there wasn’t room for her to share it. Nobody went into much detail on why the floor was better for them anyway.

“It’s not clear to my bosses just how long they’ve been working together.” Martina reaches in her bag, at the wall, pulls out a flat wooden comb, and starts combing out her damp hair. Her hair falls into locks and twists slightly longer and darker than her brother’s, and it curls along the tips in the same way.

“Who _are_ your bosses?” Jennifer asks.

Nothing moves except Martina’s comb. Eventually she says, “Ultimately, through various levels of management, the House of Saud. The structure resembles... tectonic plates, floating on a fluid core. It is always safer to assume one’s activities are reported to unfriendly agents as well as one’s partisans. If the highest levels disapproved of my associations--say, through my brother--either I would be informed clearly on what is preferred, or deterrence would happen so quick we’d never see it coming. Jake’s work on tracing out Max’s networks of income and supply… that effort has earned considerable interest. Last year Max recruited Indian physicists on Saudi property, with threats captured on Saudi surveillance. Not once did he stop to consult, didn’t listen when… how to say this... _delicately calibrated_ advice was offered. For the last two years he was always going behind the backs of allies who would have advised differently. That was the highest folly.”

Nat tilts her head to one side, hoists one brow high, and says, “One of our Lebanese friends called it ‘grenade in a china shop, being generous about how much collateral damage Max caused.’ Nobody was happy about it.”

Aisha rubs her hands together against the cold. “So why didn’t somebody take him down with severe prejudice?”

“What an excellent question.” Martine combs out another sheaf of hair out. She gestures at Nat with the comb. “It undercut certain reliable associations useful to American and EU interests, which caused… readjustments. Families affiliated with the royals are very quick to smell the slightest whiff of splinter groups. They have long practice in managing a restless population with severe prejudice.”

“You mean early interventions.” Nat regards her tea, not looking at any of them.

Aisha just snorts again. “Gal, your bosses have prisons full of guys with ambitions. We’re not just talking about outraged civil rights leaders getting arrested. And that’s the ones they allow to _live.”_

Martina waves the comb. “That’s guys who lack Max’s sort of resources. Max has clout and clearly shouldn’t, according to… those folks who... _offer suggestions_ when my employers make plans. They must know who’s protecting Max, but they may not know _all_ the reasons why, so they’re cautious as a result. Jake might dig that out for everybody to see. The results could… destabilize a lot of delicate associations. It has already changed the calculations of risk.”

“Be careful what you ask for,” Jennifer says.

Both Nat and Martina nod in sober agreement.

Nat says to Martina, “It’s interesting that you were asked… allowed, maybe... to come visit, given that your speciality is physical security, not cyber.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Martina agrees, twisting round the other way. “I’m known for guarding women. This makes my visit into a statement of interest. Sending me to reinforce my brother here declares their stake in the integrity and security of the Jensen women _en place._ Jennifer and Beth are not to be taken. Jake’s work is to progress without interference. I do not know what other resources my bosses have invested, but it could be… substantial. Nat, I assume your lovely Agent Coulson will make use of those resources to the fullest extent.”

Nat chuckles. “I’m also sure nobody’s forgotten Ross’s long history of unsanctioned operations blowing up in the face of his own superiors. Given the various toxic ponds that both of those fools are playing in, letting them run on together could set off…”

“Yes, any number of irrevocable disasters. You can be sure my bosses want both these ridiculous ass-clowns shut down.”

“You mean, shut down _safely,_ instead of hoisting themselves by their own petard,” Aisha says.

“A petard is a bomb, isn’t it?” Jennifer says.

“Was. Medieval, yes. Also, messy,” Nat says.

“You say that like it’s a _bad_ thing,” Aisha says.

“You’re as bad as Roque about things that blow up, I swear,” Jennifer says, and the other two chuckle.

“Theory has it that Max’s snooks are pretty damn messy too.”

Nat says, “You should’ve heard what _Tony_ had to say about Max’s snook bombs.”

“I heard some of _our_ consultants,” Martina says.

“The prospectus was… rather ambitious,” Aisha says.

“You saw it?”

“Mmmm, let’s say I hate wearing the skirt and hose, but I will if I have to. Sorry, I just wasn’t buying the old-timey _‘projection of power’_ theory, where you get to scrap half the budget, forget about putting any boots on the ground, just throw explosives. Bomb the shit out of things to make people do what you want. Like there’s any history of _that_ working, like, anywhere.”

“Syria, anybody?” Nat says dryly.

“Also, hey gals?” Aisha growls. “Snooks--we’re talking the kind of bombs where nobody understands the physics. Well, outside of those wacky folks at Stark Industries. Nobody who’s been trying to shop the things around for Max could answer the most _basic_ things I asked. And Stark’s bunch are not allowing anyone to use _their_ tech that way.”

“Thank God,” Martina puts in.

“Our people said they’re not sure anybody could stabilize those designs without Stark’s patents. Kept talking about unstable repulsor matrix potentials.” Nat shakes her head.

There’s thoughtful humming noises. A comment like that meant that Tony, via Nat’s boss Coulson, wants the news widely spread and acknowledged. Tony is out of that arms race, he isn’t using his tech for bombs any more, so the warning is more serious.

“Hard to make something foolproof when fools are so ingenious,” Jennifer responds.

“Exactly,” Martina says, and starts twisting strands of her hair.

“You want it braided up?” Aisha says.

“Sure,” Martina agrees, and gropes for elastic hair ties in her bag. “Thanks.” She turns sidewise to Aisha, first one way then the other, and when Aisha has coiled up each short braid into a little bun and bound it in place with the ties, Martina nods and thanks her again. Then Martina takes a final sip of tea, and lays down in her blankets near the door, sighing. Then she says, “I’m very glad to be here, with company.”

“Likewise. And it’s not just, ‘many hands make light work,’ either,” Nat agrees, patting Aisha’s shoulder.

Aisha grunts, moving aside for Nat to crawl under Jennifer’s four poster bed to get to her blankets. Then Aisha tucks her legs into her own blankets. She’s near the window, which is cold, but she prefers sleeping by unconventional exits. “Many hands make more mouths to feed in the morning.”

Jennifer chuckles. “You got that right, and I’m drafting Cougar to help me cook it.”

“It’s help with washing up after I always had trouble with,” Jennifer says.

“Roque cleans stuff up better, out of that bunch,” Aisha suggests. “And get their girl, Liz, to help him out. Seems like the sort who needs to keep busy.”

“Good idea,” Jennifer says, sounding sleepy. “You think she’s up to wrangling both of those guys, the way it looks?”

There’s snorts.

“Big old teddy bears like that? Easy,” Nat says, from under the bed.

“If they’re not all wrapped up together by the morning, I’d be very surprised.” Martina yawns and stretches and turns back and forth a couple of times.

“Wrapped round her little finger,” Nat says, curling up in her blankets, shifting only once and going still.

“Hey, it gets cold in there!” Jennifer says.

“Yeah, yeah, and bet you she doesn’t mind playing tuna sandwich, either,” Aisha says.

“Would you?”

“Nope,” Aisha says. “I like big ol’ bears. In small doses, mind. They won’t get my jokes well enough, and hey, if it makes her happy, why not?”

“Admit it, you just like the toilet seat to stay down,” Martina says.

“So I’m fussy like that. I listen to enough dicks in meetings, thank you.”

“Mmmm,” Martina agrees, closing her eyes.

Aisha lies awake for awhile, listening to relays of visits to the bathroom from other parts of the house. Lying down is good for giving her joints some rest, at least. It’s not the toilet that’s so noisy, it’s the pipes gurgling at the tap when they’re washing up at the sink. At one point it’s Beth and Jake tiptoing along like crashing bears, where Jake is standing restlessly outside humming softly to himself, and then walking his niece back to the living room, with a grunt from Cougar that he’s awake. At another point it’s Clay and Roque and Liz taking turns, mostly muttering and basso rumbles, not much sound from their walking across the floorboards. The girl has a decently soft footfall, which is interesting. When Steve and Clint drop by, she only hears them speaking to each other once, in the bedroom, trading off.

At last Martina moves a little, gives a chuckle. “Your turn first, or mine?”

“Go ahead,” Aisha says.

“Aaaarggh, it’s cold,” Martina says, stepping off the wads of blanket. “Cold cold cold.”

“Dibs on third,” Jennifer says.

“Yeah,” Aisha says. “Want me to refill the tea pot?”

“Please,” Nat says from under the bed.

Aish starts to laugh, as softly as she can. A blast of wind outside drowns her out, hammers the siding like it’s trying to rip off the boards, subsiding to an arctic moan through the cracks and crevices of the house.

Nat says something about weather stripping, with cursewords in Russian _mat._

“You should see it when it’s a blizzard outside,” Jennifer says.

“Just don’t _sit down,_ ever,” Nat says.

“I hear another Siberia story coming on,” Jennifer says.

“Shhh!” Nat says.

Aisha puts her hand over her mouth, trying to keep it quiet.

“Why is that so funny?” Jennifer says.

“Other people’s pain,” Aisha says solemnly.

“It’s a technical problem, when it’s so cold that you crack off the nice concerned mother’s fake fur toilet seat set, well, the fur clumps break off in little frozen bits of ice,” Nat says.

“It’s a problem when your pee freezes on your tush, too,” Aisha adds.

“Yeah, that’s too cold,” Jennifer says. “Why weren’t you wearing some kind of, I don’t know, astronaut gear?”

“Like a catheter is going to feel any better in that weather,” Nat adds, as if she knows.

“You’re not making it _any_ easier,” Jennifer says, huddling up in her blankets.

A shape looms at the open door. “Hey, is this where you have the cool slumber party?”

“No, just the warm one.”

“Yeah, come in and add some body heat,” Jennifer says.

“And this is _with_ that old heater going,” Jake says. “Cougs said there’s something wrong with it, it’s so old it’s not working very well. Not enough burners or something.”

There’s a mumble at the door and a shorter shape steps across the blankets. “Mmumm,” it whines.

“Here, crawl up in the warm spot,” Jennifer says, making room. It sounds as if this happens a lot. Perhaps that explains why Martina settled in here, expecting both mother and child to end up in here eventually, and not too worried because her brother was on watch out there.

“Sit on my blankets,” Aisha says to Jake, standing up when Martina returns. “Keep them warmed up for me.”

“Where’s Cougar?” Jennifer says.

There’s a grunt from the door, and another shape joins Jake, folding up onto Aisha’s blankets. Aisha reaches down for the teapot, takes it with her to the cold, cold bathroom. And no, she does not sit down on that seat. But somebody just spent some time cleaning it up ahead of her, so she returns the favor. The disinfectant wipes are icy.

“Sit with me,” Martina says to Aisha, once she’s set the tea pot to heat up. “Did you guys bring your mugs?”

“I’ll get them,” Cougar says, and departs silently.

“Mmm,” Aisha says, shivering. She settles between Martina’s knees, tugging the blankets close around them both.

“Beth, your fingers are like popsicles,” Jennifer says.

“Yours too,” Martina says to Aisha.

“Sorry.”

When Cougar returns with three mugs, Nat crawls out from under the bed and starts setting up fresh tea for everyone. Nobody seems surprised when Cougar sits down between Jake’s knees and Jake pulls up Aisha’s top blankets around the two of them. Cougar is, of course, wearing the hat. It doesn’t seem to get in their way while cuddling, somehow.

“I know what would put Beth back to sleep,” Jake says then.

“What?”

“Christmas carols,” Jake says.

“It’s not even Halloween,” Aisha says.

“It feels cold enough,” Martina says.

Nat just chuckles. She’s the one who starts singing first, too. She knows a lot of them, including German lieder nobody else has heard before. Jake turns out to have a surprising high falsetto that can reach Noel levels without even straining much. Also, he’s right. Three songs in and Beth is snoring. Jennifer finally slides her down flat, covers her with the blankets on the bed, and steps away with wincing noises until she finds mislaid slippers. She returns making hissing noises, crossing the blanketed floor in a rush, and diving into her blankets only just carefully enough to keep her daughter from waking up.

“Tea,” Nat says, passing it across.

“Thank you, Nat, God, and all the little angels, in that order,” Jennifer says, huddling close over the mug.

“You’re welcome,” Nat says.

“There’s a woman who’s been too cold too many times before,” Jake mumbles.

“Indeed,” Nat says. “Hey, Clint. Get yourself and Steve mugs, have some tea.”

There’s a murmur from the doorway, and in a few minutes the two men are stepping carefully over the crowd, settling near the last open corner by the bed, carrying blankets with them.

Clint’s voice says, in the dim light, “Clay and Roque and Liz are coming too. They can sit back here.”

“There’s room,” Steve says.

And they do.

“This is great,” Clay says, settling blankets around Roque and Liz, and then sitting crosslegged between Roque and Steve, all of them huddled in blankets and sipping their tea.

“Getting some warmth going in here, huh?” Jake says, turning about, and then he and Cougar have shifted around so Cougar is sitting crosslegged with Jake’s head on his knee, Jake is curled up under the blanket, and Cougar’s arm moves as if he’s stroking Jake’s head and shoulders.

“Here, Cougar, extra blanket for you,” Steve says, standing up and holding it out.

“Thanks,” Cougar murmurs, wrapping himself up. “Ooooh. Warm. Nice.”

Steve chuckles, and sits down again. “Was that _Tannenbaum_ you guys sang earlier?”

“Mmm,” Nat agrees. They start talking about other German songs, and Nat sings some more of them for Steve, which should feel weird but doesn’t. When they slow down talking, Steve gets up. “I’ll just run around and check perimeter for a bit.”

“I’m coming too,” Barton says firmly.

“Sure. Clay, Roque? Sure, you two are up when we get back. Password is orange pekoe.”

There’s chuckles, and then the two Avengers depart quietly.

“Sending Steve out there is sort of like sending out the Koh-i-nor diamond to flash around in Ross’s face because it gives the best light,” Aisha says.

Nat chuckles. “Oh, Steve knows that. There’s a certain pleasure in the middle finger salute.”

“Or the knuckle sandwich?” Aisha says.

“Mmm,” Nat agrees, and stretches in the dim light by the teapot.

Aisha feels Martina’s hands come up and start stroking her shoulders and slide up her neck, brushing the tense muscles there, and she just tilts her head back into it with a murmur. She’s as bad as Jake, going off to sleep with those clever Alvarez hands smoothing away the last little bits of muscle tension and alertness. She thinks maybe Martina doesn’t mind sitting up for awhile, keeping an eye out, the same way her brother does. Naturals at the graveyard shift, she’d said earlier. It’s a good thing they are, Aisha thinks, right before she falls asleep leaning back into the woman’s arms.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name of the music video here turned out prophetic. The lyrics and the actor here reminded me of Cougar so strongly I also had to borrow the idea in it.  
> The Belle Brigade - Losers
> 
> http://youtu.be/J0-HLG7Dxec
> 
> It’s unclear in the video story what will happen to the dogs. Dumping these dogs into open fields and driving away to leave them there is doing them no favors at all. Ranch people really won’t appreciate the idea that somebody just abandoned the dogs out there. So of course one hopes that the kid in the story is going to make sure somebody helps them, that they have somewhere to go. In real life, according to the band’s behind-the-scenes video, the dogs are all actors out there having a great time.  
> I’m also fond of their song Lucky Guy, which could apply to any one or all of the Losers.
> 
> http://youtu.be/Rm_WYar7mBE


	16. Just Put Your Fingers In Your Ears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roque has been sleeping on the floor, the house is cold, and Jensen starts singing Journey's song, "Don't Stop Believing." Also, the newer song "Radioactive," which isn't anachronistic at all if you consider the team has been lurking out of sight for some years before Tony Stark dragged them up into Avengers Tower and bargained with SHIELD to put them back to work.  
> Apparently, enticing General Ross and Max and Max's henchman Wade out into the open could be considered a fairly strenuous exercise for anybody else.  
> For the Losers?  
> SOP.

“Because he was raised by wolves, that’s why.”

Cougar’s sister, aka Pantera, stands just outside the kitchen door, shaking rain off her jacket. She steps in, glances up at Steve, who is carefully hanging up his jacket on one of the wall hooks, and then he takes hers, smoothing out the sleeves. “I’m not joking. Seriously, the boy lived out in a literal wolf den most of one summer when the honored inlaws _and_ the parents were fighting a lot. He put boards up, built a whole big cover over this whole complex of holes. One time I came out there to look for him and there was a couple rattlers holed up there against the heat.”

She pulls the door shut, gives the yank that’s required to make the deadbolt engage. She frowns at it, and goes on, “Another time, I heard a fight going on before I could see anything. One of those skinny little Mexican wolves was fending off a bunch of coyotes from her pups in that den, and Carlos was right there, zinging coyotes with his slingshot. I have no idea why she tolerated him. None. Later on, when everybody figured out where to look for him, he went up trees instead. He liked some big old pinyon pines and cedars in the ravines about a mile from our house.” She stops talking, looks at Steve more closely. “Yeah, now you’re wondering what was wrong with the grownups, huh?”

Steve’s lips tighten. He turns away, pulls out mugs, hands them to Jake’s sister Jennifer, standing there in her robe and slippers in front of the bubbling coffee pot.

When Steve turns back to Pantera, he’s shrugging. “People tell me lots of stories, you’d be amazed. Lots of reasons why they do things like leave their kids at home. They say they have no choice about it. The lady who works overtime, the guy with two jobs--” he shakes his head.

“Yeah, and the people who drink too much, whatever reason they’ve got,” Jennifer says grimly. She shakes her head too.

Pantera shrugs. “Carlos, he doesn’t spend much time on it. He’s got no patience for it when the cousins are all reminiscing about stuff. They talk like it was all cute valentines, but we both remember it differently. Really takes the fun out of it.”

“That eidetic memory thing,” Steve says.

“Really messes up socializing at holidays. I mean, some of those suckers were _mean,_ you know? Some of the guys at prom time, they dropped by showing off their cars and their girls, and him--he’d just got back from Basic for maybe a week. Not talking. I guess they just wanted to rub it all in his face, they were all set up ready for weddings and church and shit, when we were out getting dirt up our pants. We’d hung up a couple of deer on the porch hooks, still bleeding out in pans. He came out holding some liver--turned out he’d just cooked it, he thought they’d like some of it. Great big knife in his other hand. Hah. There’s all the nice church school girls, jumping around in their white frilly dresses, just _screaming.”_

“Sounds more like Roque, doesn’t it?” says Jennifer, turning from the counter with the mugs full. They take the coffee, sighing and nodding at her, and she pours her own. She doesn’t seem too worried that Roque and Clay and Liz are all sacked out on the floor behind the kitchen table, where Roque is hearing every word.

Pantera snorts. “Oh yeah. Roque and him? Those assholes, they get off on scaring the noobs, or the straights, or the civilians, or whoever’s got them pissed off. Plus, the whole bloody horror-movie crap those girls were screaming? That weirded _me_ out, made me mad. Carlos, you know… that’s _my_ kid brother. I mean, he’s still the _nice_ one in our bunch.”

Jennifer and Steve just look at her and nod at this insanity.

“What did you do?” Jennifer asks, breathing over her coffee cup.

Pantera shrugs. “Lit a firecracker, tossed in one of those old empty metal drums.” She grins.

Yeah, the Army sniper who’ll shoot everyone before he’ll talk to his own fucking team, the documented certifiable guy climbing the rafters with a golf club swinging whenever his PTSD kicks in, he’s the _nice_ one.

Somehow, looking at Pantera, you believe it.

She waves it off. “Back then he was the gentlest, most patient kid you’ve ever met. He could get some of our autistic cousins to speak to him, he could put babies to sleep like magic, he just-- “ she waves at Steve. “You remind me of him, only bigger. Seriously.”

Steve blinks at her. “That’s...quite a compliment, thank you.”

“Roque is awesome too, just in a different way,” Pantera assures Steve. “Heavy on the chemistry and the SiC stuff and herding things. Like that big ol’ Rottweiler you always wanted as a kid, all growling and righteous and proud and shit.” She shifts restlessly, stretching her heel tendons by pressing her boot toes on the side of the cabinets, and inhales more of her coffee, murmuring something about how good it is. “These must be seriously good beans, mama.”

Steve agrees, thanking Jennifer.

Jennifer grins. “Jake bought ‘em for us, I just told him where to find ‘em. Okay, are you guys hungry for early nibbles, or shall we migrate to the living room? Jake’s got his little heater going there. We’re all night owls round here, got our clocks messed up ever since I had a dispatch job on graveyard.”

“I hear you,” says Cougar’s sister, nodding. The three of them walk out of the kitchen, down the hall, but only Jennifer’s footfalls are loud enough to be heard.

Roque shifts his weight gingerly onto his side. His hip is bothering him again, he can only spend a few hours turned that way on a hardwood floor, or on rocks, or van bench seats, or camper truckbeds, or any of the other ridiculous shit they’ve used instead of honest-to-God beds in the past few years. Oh yeah, and call themselves grateful for cover to keep dry.

Roque grimaces at his own sentimentality. He’s pushed himself by staying still longer than usual. He was trying to let Liz sleep for awhile longer before he started moving around on their rumpled-up joint bedroll. Clay might look like he was asleep, but try moving and you’d find yourself staring up the barrel of whatever sidearm was handy for a pretty long moment before Clay actually woke up. _Woke up for reals,_ as Jake Jensen, motormouth extraordinaire, would say it.

Speak of the insomniac cyberdevil, flickers of bluish light are bouncing along the ceiling of the hallway, betraying activity on the computer monitors. Jake must have climbed out of his warm nest of sleeping bags with Cougar and snuck away to the living room. Since Roque just hauled in bags of groceries that morning, there might be _some_ sugar left in the house. By now, Jenson will be most of the way through the last sampler-size candy bars. The gummie worms and the swedish fish are probably long gone by now, but there might still be some few stray generic almond clusters and animal cookies left in Jennifer’s communal bowl of sweets. Jake is tailing down on his massive sugar high, still hypering on his computer stunts, bad as a kid after Halloween. At least it’s too cold to strip down to his boxers for hacking purposes, thank you sweet Jesus for small mercies.

Roque really hates knowing this stuff about Jensen. About all of them. _Of course_ he knows this shit about each one of the Losers. He has to, including managing Clay into more sense about the crazy shit he says about taking down Max.

Liz makes a petulant little noise into Roque’s shoulder, snuffles, turns over, nudges her way into Clay’s arms, and settles back to sleep. Clay just grunts, accommodating her. Then he utters a questioning grunt.

“Mmm,” Roque grunts back at him, which means, _I’ll go look,_ and Clay relaxes with a sigh.

Roque stretches, sits up stiffly, and stretches some more, and gets up, rearranging the blankets better around Liz’s shoulders. Then he pulls on his pants and shoves his sock feet into his boots and pulls on a heavier shirt over his tee. By then, he hears Jennifer’s feet pattering back up the hallway, heading back to bed, and she’s muttering something about how cold it is. He walks up the hall, buttoning up his surplus-style jacket that’s coming slowly apart at the shoulder seams. That’s what being officially dead for a year or more will do to your wardrobe.

“Oh hey, we saved you popcorn balls,” Jake says, not looking up from the three monitors barricading him in at the end of the table. “Steve and Pantera just got back from a nice moonlit prowl. Jen got up too. Too cold in here, I guess they all decided to go back to bed.”

“Full moon?” Roque asks.

“Waning three-quarter,” Jake says. He starts humming some ridiculous pop song, something about the owl and the pussycat. Then he turns his head and smiles at the bundled-up shape at the other end of the couch, a blanket burrito of sniper and little blonde kid, topped by the Hat. No response. Impossible to tell if Cougar is listening or napping or thinking his own thoughts, the kind of crazy ones that lead to some pretty damn inscrutable mysterious out-of-nowhere comments. That is, when he is talking at all.

“You been surfing police bands again?” Roque demands.

“Always,” Jenson says, like he’s proud of it. “Although there’s only one for local, there’s some fun stuff coming out of larger towns north of here. Plus citizen bands, cool guys here.”

“Aarggh,” Roque growls, disgusted. “Freezing in here.”

“Cougs made coffee. Good coffee. From our favorite chocolatiere, the kind of coffee that never goes bitter if you drink it hours later, cold as a witch’s-”

“Ssh,” the shadow under the Hat says, sounding annoyed. “Just got Beth back to sleep.”

“Sorry, man.”

“Bad dreams?” Roque asks.

“Mmhmm,” the Hat responds.

Roque shakes his head sympathetically. Little kids shouldn’t have to endure bad dreams, it isn’t right. He says so.

“Poor kid wakes up yelling, you’re darn right it’s not right--” Jake is pounding away full speed on the keyboard.

“Mmm,” the Hat agrees.

Jake starts humming some disjointed song, murmuring words about being radioactive.

Roque scratches his skull for a moment, and sighs. “Okay, coffee.”

He is putting a mug of it in the microwave to heat up when a burst of noise in the living room gets his attention. He steps back in the living room, glaring.

“I dunno, man, I just--” Jake frowns at the monitors. “What the effing-- police dispatch was saying something about a flight of helicopters. They came in that local little airport in the ‘burbs--it doesn’t even have a tower, they just scared hell out of a surgeon who was flying his little Cessna back from Cincinnati or something-- he thought they might be some kind of smugglers, called it in, Dispatch can’t find anybody with a flight plan for these bad boys--”

“How many helos?” Pooch asks behind Roque. Pooch moves pretty damn quiet too, when he wants to. He shoves past into the living room, stretching and yawning.

“Five. No, six.”

“Lot of fuel on the burner,” Pooch says, and frowns at the empty candy bowl on the table. Then he frowns at Roque, jerks his chin toward Jensen.

“Showy,” Roque agrees, and aims a shrug at Pooch.

There’s another pounding run on the keyboard and some repetitious code on the number keypad, dappety tappety tap ding bappety bappety bop, over and over with minor variants.

Roque has no idea how Jensen can _remember_ that many strings of numbers, let alone type them accurately that fast. Jensen’s got that in common with Cougar on the freaky-deaky memory thing. When Roque tells them to do something, half the time they both stare at him with the same expression: _That’s not what you said last time._

On Cougar, it goes somewhere past deadpan poker face, heading off into fuck-off _feline._

On Jensen, it looks disconnected, like a dropped puppet. Maybe even autistic. Also, when you know what he’s capable of in a local network, downright scary.

Jensen says, “Apparently the black helos got markings but nobody recognizes the call signs, nothing pinging there--Dispatch is trying to get someone on the horn to figure out what the local sheriff ought to do.” Jake starts pounding on the keyboard again. “Yeah, tell me when the car rental agencies are gonna update their security, huh, it’s only been two years since they upgraded from the Age of the Flintstones-- yeah, there it is-- oh, look at ‘em scamper, here on the office security feed--yeah, there’s your basic assistant manager eager to make a tip-- yep, the rental company is sending out some Hummers to pick up these jerks. Very short notice.”

“Some fucking NSA bureaucrat likes to think of himself flying around like the President?” Pooch says.

“You got a burn on about those guys,” Roque says.

“Yeah, you would too if you’d seen some of their pissing matches with the Company.”

“All of ‘em are fucking germs,” Roque says.

“Coulson is decent,” Jake says.

“He’s not either one, that’s why,” Pooch says.

“He probably used to be,” Roque says, stubborn.

The Hat grunts an objection. Cougar used to be a Company asset too. But getting assigned by your service to do wet work for the Company because you’re one of the best snipers in the world isn’t the same thing at all.

“This asshole? Probably a fucking pimp or a car dealer,” Roque growls.

“WIth six helos?” Pooch says.

“Okay, it’s the fucking Prime Minister of Canada or some shit visiting his auntie, because it’s not like we’d know Canadian or British or Mexican call signs out here in the freezing back of beyond--”

“Not a small-town boy, huh, Roque?” Jake murmurs, preoccupied with flicking his gaze from one monitor to the next, very fast. It looks weird. Then he starts humming his favorite Journey song, as usual.

Roque shakes his head and goes off to get his warmed-over coffee.

When he comes back, Jenson is hammering numbers on the keyboard again. He looks up and tells Roque, “Dunno who it is yet, haven’t got eyes out there at the airport. Lemme see what I can get from the Hummers, lots of unused options hung up in that nice GPs unit on the dash…”

“Why are we spying on the movements of some fucking rock star or something a hundred miles away?”

Pooch says, rather sharply, “Sixty miles, and rock stars don’t use this kind of high-octane shit for piddly cross-country. They have tour buses, lots of space and everything on tap, much easier on the system. At least, the ones with any decent damn funding do. Did I ever tell you about the time I ran the tour vehicles for--”

“Yes,” Jake and Roque say at the same time.

“So why are we sitting up _freezing_ in the middle of the night, in your sister’s living room, listening to--” Roque waves his hand at the tangle of gear in front of Jake.

“I figure this is exactly the kind of thing we’d pick up if Max decided to pull any shit on us, and yes, I got things rigged to wake me up if stuff like this starts happening, because I am just that awesome,” Jensen says, with less emphasis than usual because he’s busy responding to some kind of online queries, read and type, read and type, rapidly.

The shadowy face under the Hat bares white teeth and growls. There’s harmonics to it. The sound is a helluva lot like the rumble of his namesake, right before a mountain lion cuts loose with a real ear-splitting howl. Which Cougar is also capable of venting, if he gets mad enough.

“Yeah, yeah,” Roque says. “C’mon, show some sense. Remember where I rigged up the mine field triggers, Cougar. Don’t you guys be going crazy out there.”

Cougar tilts back the Hat, teeth showing, and Roque meets the glare. After a long minute the Hat turns aside, and Cougar stops making that noise, and his grip finally leaves the sniper rifle laid on the table beyond the tangle of Jake’s gear. Hell, under the blankets he’s wearing his boots and his leather jacket, got his shooting gloves on, goggles hanging around his neck, he’s ready to go. Cougar _wants_ to shoot some Wade-bossed mercenary assholes without spending any time for warning to any of the team, just _go do it._ None of them have forgotten being ordered to stand down while Wade’s bunch butchered that entire village--Santa Maria--and how the Company just expected the Losers to pipe down and make nice with those assholes less than a month later. That went well.

Cougar’s never forgiven anyone in his life, far as Roque can tell.

Okay, maybe Clay. Maybe Roque, because they were hungover or drunk those times.

Jensen gets forgiven repeatedly, mainly because he’s… well, an idiot. He never knows he’s done it, or why, when he pisses off Cougar. Leaving his gun behind somewhere? Cougar’s being _nice_ if he leaves Jensen with a couple shiners and a bloody nose.

“I get it, I do,” Roque says. “We got a decent perimeter set up. You just need to keep an eye out if they cross it, right? In the meantime everybody needs to get some rest. You hear me?”

Jake, all this time, hasn’t even turned his eyes from the monitors, nor stopped typing. He just says, “Hey Cougs, we’re good. We got this. We got advance eyes out, we got Roque’s perimeter line, and we got you and your night scopes, before they even come up against Pantera and Widow and Cap and Hawkeye, which is half the Avengers plus your own sister’s awesomeness right there, and more in a few hours if we need ‘em by then. Ross wants to bring it? Let ‘em.”

Cougar nods once, settles back into the couch cushions, eases Beth around into a more comfortable position in his arms. He murmurs something in Spanish to her, and she goes right back to sleep. Then Cougar looks up at his teammates for a long moment.

Not all of them do that, but he’s the kind of sniper who always tracks where the peach-pit spot in your brain is, instant kill spot, as you move around. He does that with everybody he’s around, no special exemptions for family or team or friends. Just part of the baggage with Cougar.

Same as Roque is always aware of which knife he’d pull for which task in a defensive fight, if somebody wakes up screaming with a gun in their fist and starts shooting at him.

Yeah, there’s been a few things to forgive, down the years.

“ _Hate_ it when he does that,” Pooch says.

Not even turning his head, Jensen says, “Stand down boys, you’re waking up the toy dinos.”

Roque can hear Pooch beside him, breathing hard. Finally the driver sucks in a deep breath of air, lets it out again.

“Yeah,” Pooch says. “Yeah. Okay, if they hit the freeway going south, give it maybe an hour, hour and a half, before they pull into the junction downtown here. I mean, if they’re heading in our direction at all.”

“Max seems pretty showy to me,” says Natasha from the hallway door.

“Concur on that,” says Cougar’s sister. Pantera, or whatever. “Do we allow an extra twenty minutes for an argument with the local LEOs at the airport?”

“If the law gets there before the Hummers get on the road, yes. After they’re on the road with their principle in the middle of the formation, they’ll refuse to pull over,” Natasha says crisply.

“Probably claim some kind of national security authorization.” Jake is talking too quickly, in rhythm with his typing.

“Why aren’t they doing it now?” Pantera asks.

“Hmmm, not sure. Odd. Could it even be something to do with rules?” Jake starts a new string of queries in a new window on his third monitor. “I know federal airspace and county airport jurisdiction are different, so maybe different rules apply.”

“This is Max we’re talking about.”

“Max is perfectly capable of articulating the rules when it inclines to his advantage,” Natasha says.

“ _Please_ tell me she’s wearing the bitch boots,” Jake says.

“Yes, I am, and yes, I can _hear_ you,” Natasha says, annoyed.

“That’s just my hindbrain salivating, it’s kind of an automatic reflex,” Jake says.

“Poor boy, he has quite a lot of company in suffering this problem,” Pantera says dryly.

“Yeah, it’s a problem. I’m sure you get lots of that stuff yourself,” Natasha says coolly.

“Indeed,” Cougar’s sister says, arching an eyebrow.

“Guuuhhh,” Jake says.

“Ladies, if you could take the flirting elsewhere, we’d avoid serious porn brain-lock on our hacker here,” Roque says.

“Such a shame he can’t handle the live version,” Pantera agrees, and walks away silently down the hall toward the bathroom, not allowing the creaky floorboards to betray her movements.

“Ahh well, don’t worry, Roque, Cougar will hit the reset button on Jake before it gets too bad,” Natasha says, and saunters away into the kitchen. From the deliberate noises there, she’s in search of more hot water for tea.

“Did I just-- wait a minute-- hey, did she just _out_ me?” Jake protests.

“To your former SiC? Hell yes, she just outed both you and Cougar, if anybody was asking. Which hell no, we ain’t, and we won’t, and _shut up,_ I really don’t need to bleach _that_ one out of my brain, thank you.” Pooch points a warning finger at the Hat, who just looks back at him with a big white grin from the shadows under the brim. Probably the single biggest grin Roque has ever seen under that hat, which includes the shot that took care of the Honduran General, and other shots resolving a good dozen extremely hairy sit-reps.

“No. The Pooch does not need to know. Just, no.” The mechanic’s thick forefinger waves warningly.

The Hat keeps grinning. Oh hell, it’s an outright leer. A really sloppy proud delighted ridiculous crazy monkey-love ‘smex is the whole point of life’ as their team’s champion one and only sex-cowboy could possibly live it-- _never mind._

“Gaaaaa,” Roque says, making a face. He looks down, finds his mug is empty. “I need more coffee for this.” Oh yeah, he’s been learning from Clay, all these years. He’s known for a long time that on many, many things, Clay’s attitude is correct. Just say it loud and proud:

“No. No. I did not hear that. Or that either.”

_Shut uuuuuuup._

This is especially true when it comes to Pooch and his unconventional acquisitions of transport, or picking up supplies, or weapons, or just about anything else-- _just don’t ask._ Sometimes, the better part of command is figuring out when not to be there, not to hear things, and not to react to extreme provocations. Just put your fingers in your ears, _laaaaalalalalala._

Another outburst of hacker chatter, garbling out something about Zen aphorisms and Kung Fu Panda and My Little Pony all mushed up together with l33t-speak, makes Roque flinch in front of the coffee pot.

“Do you ever get used to it?” Natasha says, offering him the last of the coffee pot.

“No,” Roque says morosely.

She nods. “I’ve got the full-grown version.”

“Worse?” Roque says, despairing.

She nods.

“It gets _worse?”_

She just smiles at him pityingly, hands him the empty poffee pot to wash, and says gently, “Tony Stark.”

“Hit a man when he’s down, wouldja,” Roque mumbles.

“Just part of my style,” she says, and smiles at him.

“Gaaaaaa,” Roque says.

 

 

 

 


	17. Storm Cells

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guys like Pooch keep saying things like, "Hey, what's the worst that could happen?"  
> Jolene knows the answer to that one in way too many scenarios.

At 3 am, Jensen shouts, “Shit, guys-- oh shit-- we got a storm cell forming up in the northeast corner of the county--”

Jolene hears the tv announcer rambling solemnly in the background while little flits and blurts of noise compete with it from various weather channels announcing themselves to the living room at large. Jensen really does flip through things at an alarming speed of comprehension when he’s seriously working. Flash-flash-flash, he’s scanning through, checking for changes in the reports from the usual sources. The reflected light bouncing off the hall ceiling might as well be a strobe.

There’s a growl from Roque somewhere in there, something about the motherfucking Midwest and their shitty weather. Stomping steps, and the bang of a door slamming shut. He’s probably heading out on a final check, looking if everything’s tied down.

Then Jensen is talking again. “No kidding, unstable air masses since two days ago, but this? No more warning than this? Shit, that was quick--”

“Baby,” Pooch says, and there’s the ghost of a kiss on the back of her neck, “how do you feel about spending the day in the basement?”

Jolene sighs. “I saw this basement. It is not pretty. It is possibly the single most whacked-out building project I’ve seen in a long time, and baby, that includes _all_ the projects you and Jensen have cobbled together over the years. I mean, the ones I’ve seen. Missions don’t count.”

“I made sure you had a bathroom and a couch and a battery-powered fridge down there,” Pooch says apologetically.

“The gun mounts in the windows were just that little extra touch to show that you really care,” Jolene adds, dead-pan.

“Uh,” Pooch says. “Well, yeah. This is the Losers we’re talking about, right?”

“Guess I’m lucky there isn’t a double barbed wire enclosure with a couple guard towers.”

“Just haven’t got to it,” Pooch says, equally dead-pan. “Hey, Roque was pushing for triple-line fencing with rolls of loose barb between.”

Jolene snorts.

“You know what Jennifer said about it?” Pooch says, in that teasing early morning tone.

“What?”

He does the drawling voice of Jensen’s sister : “‘Hey, at least it’ll keep the deer out of the vegetable garden.’”

Joelene puts her hand over her face when she laughs. Give them that, Pooch has always shared laughter in bed with her. Sometimes that was all you could do about some disaster. Floods, roofs falling in, family throwing epic tantrums, floors failing--living in ancient military housing, they’ve seen it all. Just laugh. Hell, you might as well, some of the messes they’ve lived through.

“Oh please God tell me those damn choppers--”

“Helos,” Pooch says patiently.

“--aren’t flying right through that--”

“--storm cell. Yeah, they probably are.”

“You’d think Max would have more concern for his own neck,” Jolene says, puzzled.

“Maybe he gets off on it,” Pooch mutters into the pillow. “That kind of bucks, he musta been pretty isolated his whole life from anything ever having much impact.”

Joelene feels a frown start to wrinkle her brow. Aisha had _told_ her about picking out Clay’s team specifically because Clay came from the same history and background as Max, their families knew each other. Jolene had a powerful impulse to shout at Aisha about that--please Gawd don’t do her boys any _favors--_ but that desire to scream _quite a lot_ had stayed behind locked teeth. Aisha drove up to Fort Hood and pulled the team away with some bogus story just before they were supposed to fly out to Bolivia. That might have been the only thing that kept them from being at the effed-up Company op at that drug runner’s compound where all those kids died. The Losers were _supposed_ to be in on that raid. Somebody wanted them burnt regardless. Pix of the Losers had been splashed around in the files and news reports exactly as if her guys did take part in it. Jensen said it was really sloppy work, though, easily cut through by any reporter with a calendar.

It was _supposed_ to be the Losers who got shot down in that rescue helo.

Lucky guys, Aisha got there first, yanked them out to go after Max instead, and that had not been part of the plan by whoever had completely suborned and co-opted the relevant Company managers. Totally innocent guys got sent out there, killed in their place, and the only two officers in Clay’s command who kicked up a fuss--meaning, they got in touch with Clay and tried to help out--had found themselves stationed in the Sahel to oversee some foundation doing data analysis on grass cover and rainfall.

Pooch had got that much out of Clay. Jolene had that out of Pooch in about nine minutes flat, and it only took her that long because he was fighting it so hard. After all the crap he’s been through in that man’s military, he still can’t quite believe his own command would let the Company tick them off with a red pen, marked off as a liability because Max or General Ross or whoever it was _told_ them to, just like that.

They’ve got enough stupid ops under their belts, it was anybody’s guess where the actual touchy bit was. Just a question of figuring that out. And then, Clay told her with a nasty grin, stomping on the ticklish bits with all the force they had.

With Captain America in the house, that amounted to quite a lot of stomp.

Clay hadn’t even blinked when Jolene asked him about that. Just nodded. Clay, now, he _knew_ how easily that red pen ticked off men to die. Clay knew his team should’ve been taken down a dozen times, and only by the grace of God had they dodged those bullets. Clay sure as hell didn’t act like _he_ was safely insulated by money from anything, ever. He didn’t have the common sense of a rooster on steroids, but he sure knew he could be hit, and hurt, and maybe even _die._

“Oh no, we’re losing signal on the rental car guys going to meet the--” Jensen says in the other room..

“--to meet the helos,” Jolene finishes. She’s been listening for awhile.

“Yeah,” Pooch says, turning over. He’s looking off into the hallway. Then he sighs, and puts down his feet, making little wincing noises at how cold the floor is. There’s gaps and whistling noises from some of those planks, half the flooring in the place must be fifty years old. But that does offer the guarantee the place bends and gives like a loosely-strung ship, and it’s survived a helluva a lot of prairie storms past. There’s far worse places to be on a night like this. Pooch takes a step over to the crib, picks up their limp, saggy, sleeping child, checks the diaper, wraps him better in the blanket, and brings Junior over to her, lays him down on the bed.  Kid's only been asleep maybe an hour, fussing all night with some kind of stomach bug.

“Phew, he needs changing,” Jolene says.

“Yeah,” Pooch agrees, and lifts the diaper bag up onto the bed, and then he flees to the living room, saying something about checking on the larger situation, the great big jerk. He can drive through outright fires, but threaten him with a dirty diaper or baby spit-up and he becomes a flop-sweat puddle of helplessness. Embarrassing. She’s going to have to enlist Jennifer, at least, and do a serious intervention on this avoidance behavior of his. She hears the kitchen door slam, and Roque is growling something at Clay.

Then she hears lockers banging open somewhere under the floorboards, and metal things clicking together. Somebody’s filling up the gun mounts. Probably Clay, judging by the sloppy, fast noises. You wouldn’t hear Cougar moving guns around. You’d only _see_ him, hanging from the rafters or climbing down out of a tree into one of the dormer windows. You wouldn’t see that much if you weren’t watching carefully. Cougar is a bit strange about heights. Hellfire, every one of them is weird about completely different things, not overlapping enough so’s you’d notice it. _They_ notice it, set off by tiny little irritants that get them shouting at each other, but nobody outside would understand.

It’s odd to watch Clay just cut it short with some word, or Pooch will say just something completely off the wall, or Jensen will crack a joke. Just like that, the guys will stop shouting and bump fists and all walk away nodding, as if it’s all fixed--until the next time.

Always works, even that one time Roque and Cougar had each other at the point of cocked weapons right to each other’s guts over her kitchen table. Over _Jolene’s_ kitchen table, the first night they all came by to pick up her and Junior, and she and Pooch got to drop their entire life into a rental truck, the rest into a dumpster out back.

Neither one was blinking. Jensen walked in after her, dropped a huge long register receipt on the table right next to them and said, “Sugar for all, Roque owes me a hundred and twenty bucks, the shotgun shells gotta get put away before my niece figures out interesting things to do with them, and I ain’t leaving the ice cream to melt in the trunk while you guys kiss and make up.”

Cougar made a weird growly noise in his chest, and Roque just curled his lip and said, “Seventy five, Clay owes the rest,” and they both lowered their weapons. Roque sheathed the enormous blade, and Cougar clicked the safety on his sidearm, and they both walked out to unload the groceries as if nothing happened.

Even more infuriating to hear Jake kidding Roque about it beside the car.  “Yeah, the old man’s still got it, come right down to it, huh? Sittin’ in the Deadeye Saloon over five aces, ready to go for it--”

Cougar had come up silently behind Jake and whopped him mightily in the middle of the back, and Jake swung around and hit him back, and then they were rolling around on the ground with Jake fending off kicks from Cougar’s boot toes that weren’t exactly playing around.

“You boys play rough,” Roque had said, and picked up bags of groceries under Jolene’s glare, and walked around her and then around the sprawl on the ground.  When he came out, he popped open a can of beer, sat down on the porch and watched them, offering criticism of their technique. “Sloppy--get that fist up! Block it, block it!” he yelled more than once.

Clay, when he got back from buying ammo with Aisha, was appalled. _Appalled,_ he said. He sat them all down to start a reasonable conversation, but by then none of the boys were willing to talk about it. Jolene and Pooch took turns shouting at them about the flimsy walls of their rental, and collateral damage, and all the rest. The scruffy bunch of them played dumb and sullenly refused to admit whatever it was set them off in the first place, probably because it would sound so stupid to say it in front of everyone.

Jolene figured it was about Jensen’s hacking. Later, she got it out of Pooch that Roque and Jensen already argued that morning about hacking money from specific corporate accounts that Clay was just dead sure nobody would notice, where Jensen disagreed about how long it would take for somebody to wake up and realize just who was doing it. Jensen wasn’t usually the cautious one about this stuff, either.

Roque had to bring it up again, just once too often, because Roque was a stubborn SOB and hated running tight on the ammo budget--and there was Cougar with his sidearm out, eyeball to eyeball over it.

Cougar only lost it when it was about Jensen. He never got angry when somebody asked him to cheat in card games or billiards to work up some grocery money. Anybody’s guess if the sniper was going to be more or less touchy about his boy genius now they’d got serious.

First morning she got here, she woke up and came in the kitchen to drink some of Jennifer’s coffee, and it wasn’t Jennifer who’d made it. She watched Cougar teaching Jake how to tango. She started humming along, sometimes calling it and clapping in time to help Jake get his feet sorted out, because Cougar asked for her help. There’s no question how totally focused Jake is on learning what Cougar gives him. That’s serious.

On the other hand, they’re not the newest couple in this place right now. Nobody’s asked Clay or Roque what the hell is going on with Liz, that nice young cashier they brought home in what amounts to protective custody.  If Jolene has anything to say about it, nobody will ask, either. Packing this little place to the rafters with kids and strays and soldiers was just asking for all kinds of confrontation.

So far the big fight hadn’t happened. Somebody waved it off when it started getting tense. Somebody started washing pots and pans without being asked, somebody else apologized. Nat shoved a mug of tea in your hand. Captain America looked right down in your face with those big open eyes, and suddenly it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

She and Jennifer had talked about it a little.

They’d both noticed Roque was keeping clear of Cougar and Jake, though the boys weren’t making it easy. Cougar got to smooching his hacker in Jennifer’s kitchen, timing it just so over the multiple pans of scrambled eggs and bacon, and turned out the best breakfasts Jolene had ever eaten outside her own mom’s place. Jennifer claimed it was due to the eggs from her chickens. They were certainly laying better since the boys fixed up the new coop and yard for them.

Besides, Roque has calmed down amazingly since Liz came to stay. He just had other things to worry about. In light of those hellbillies giving Liz a hard time at work, for instance, he started asking whether it was safe to drive over to Liz’s place to pick up more clothes and some of her stuff. Worrying whether it was safe for her to go back to work at all. Asking what other jobs Liz might be able to do instead, what neighborhoods might be safer for a new apartment. That she reportedly kicked in somebody’s teeth to protect her own self in the last few weeks just makes Roque even more smooshy-hearted about her.

Rescuer to the bone, that man. Liz might just as well have been the big ugly dog they’d unchained from the garage floor at that stupid drug ranch down the road.   Jolene hears the click of nails, and a soft whoof of breath at the doorway, and then the nails go clicking away again.  Just checking on her, doing the rounds.  Poor thing has been pacing up and down the hall all night with Jolene, like it takes both of them to walk the baby back to sleep.

Jolene is not entirely sure why she has the same sensation about Aisha owning all of the Losers. Watching the dynamics, it really looks like the woman won the Losers like a string of race horses in a poker game. Aisha’s tested what she got, and right now she’s still focused on taking down Max. Post-Max, it’s anybody’s guess what she’ll want. Aisha acts like she hasn’t quite decided if she’ll let Coulson and the Avengers borrow them now and then, just because it will help keep them fit in some good training exercises, and she might need them later for other bigger things.

Jolene has no doubt there may be bigger things.  Jolene has the weird sensation it might be better for the Losers, too, much as they might prefer to drop into safe, quiet domesticity for the rest of their lives. This little house experience shows they’d be good at being ordinary again.  Jolene’s not sure if it’d be good _for_ them. Not yet.

That’s the problem with being a soldier’s wife, being married to the real thing, as opposed to all those goddamn poseurs covered in gold leaf who ticked off the lives of her boys with a little red pencil. If they ever find out who did that, Roque and Cougar will have to outdraw Jolene to shoot the bastard first. They wouldn’t mind helping her get in there to do it, either. Or training with her to get her speed up.

Which, yeah, it’s a little creepy to know that kind of thing about her own personal adopted crew of badass ex-dead guys.

“I’m just gonna haveta have a talk with your gramomma about this,” Jolene says crossly to the baby.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not the end of this story, but Lose the Avengers has got pretty long, so I want to shift to a new subsection as a different fic exchange.

**Author's Note:**

> This got long and I kept going in a new section. Actually complicated series-posting position-swapping stuff means the next bit is elsewhere, here.  
> ["Lullaby"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4601178/chapters/10484583)  
> ["Not Quite Götterdämmerung"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3203072)  
> Which is followed by another chapter  
> ["When Norse Gods Meddle Part 1B, Valkyries Too?"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4601178/chapters/10485171)  
> The nickname J-Mageddon came from LadyJannelly's series Walk a While With Me, about Jake as a hairdresser booted from the Army before he got to join the Losers. That's here:  
> [https://archiveofourown.org/works/457182]()  
> My notes in the previous series on admirable fic and sources for tech notes, Army slang, etc., are also in force here.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Scared cats and brave dogs [Art]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/999663) by [slashersivi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashersivi/pseuds/slashersivi)




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